A Companion to François Rabelais (Renaissance Society of America, 16) 9789004360037, 9789004460232, 9004360034

Citation preview

A Companion to François Rabelais

The Renaissance Society of America texts and studies series

Editor-in-Chief David Marsh (Rutgers University)

Editorial Board Anne Coldiron (Florida State University) Paul Grendler, Emeritus (University of Toronto) James Hankins (Harvard University) Gerhild Scholz-Williams (Washington University in St. Louis) Lía Schwartz Lerner (cuny Graduate Center)

volume 16

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/rsa

A Companion to François Rabelais Edited by

Bernd Renner

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Allegory on Rabelais’s writing (1740). Artist: Jacob Folkema (1692–1767). Courtesy Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, object number rp-p-1908-3670. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Renner, Bernd, 1966- editor. Title: A companion to François Rabelais / edited by Bernd Renner. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Renaissance society of America texts & studies series, 22123091 ; vol.16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "A Companion to François Rabelais offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the works of François Rabelais, one of the most influential writers of the Western literary tradition. A monk, medical doctor, translator and editor, Rabelais embodies the ideals of Renaissance humanism. His genre-bending fiction combines vast erudition, comic verve, and critical observations of all spheres of contemporary life that are relevant to this day. Two sections of this volume situate Rabelais's work in the larger social, political, and literary context of his time. A third section gives concise interpretations of each of the five books of the Pantagrueline Chronicles. The contributors are eminent scholars of early modern literature, many of whom write in English for the first time"– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: lccn 2021022009 (print) | lccn 2021022010 (ebook) | isbn 9789004360037 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | isbn 9789004460232 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Rabelais, François, approximately 1490-1553?–Criticism and interpretation. Classification: lcc pq1694 .c66 2021 (print) | lcc pq1694 (ebook) | ddc 843/.3–dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022009 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022010 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. issn 2212-3091 isbn 978-90-04-36003-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-46023-2 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Figures ix Abbreviations of the Most Common Journals Notes on Contributors xi Introduction: Why Read Rabelais Now? Bernd Renner

1

part 1 Life and Context 1

Rabelais in His Time 25 Mireille Huchon

2

Rabelais and Medicine 49 Claude La Charité

3

Rabelais and Religion 75 Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou

4

Rabelais and Politics 99 Michael Randall

5

Greco-Roman Tradition and Reception Romain Menini

6

Rabelais and Eloquence 143 Daniel Ménager (†)

7

Rabelais, Giants, and Folklore Walter Stephens

159

8

Rabelais and Travel Literature Frank Lestringant

185

9

Rabelais and Theatre Jelle Koopmans

216

121

x

vi

contents

part 2 The Five Books 10

Pantagruel 243 Jean-Charles Monferran and Marie-Claire Thomine

11

The Prequel Gargantua: An Original Reworking of Pantagruel 272 Nicolas Le Cadet

12

The Third Book 299 Diane Desrosiers

13

Interpreting the Quart Livre Paul J. Smith

14

The Fifth and Last Book (1564) Gérard Milhe Poutingon

325

357

part 3 Influence, Impact, and Style 15

At the Foot of the Letter, La Pantagrueline Prognostication Tom Conley

16

Rabelais and Language 402 Marie-Luce Demonet

17

Missing Women: On the Riddle of Gender Relations in Rabelais’s Fiction 429 François Cornilliat

18

Between Laughter and Indignation: Rabelais and Militant Writing Bernd Renner

19

Rabelaisian Humor John Parkin

20

The World in Pantagruel’s Gut Jeff Persels

491

515

381

455

vii

contents

21

Rabelais (Not) Translated (16th–21st Centuries) Elsa Kammerer Bibliography 571 Index of Primary Texts 616 Index of Secondary Texts 618

540

Figures 15.1 Title-page, Pantagrueline Prognostication certaine veritable et infallible pour lan mil. d.xxxiii (Lyon: François Juste, 1532) 384 15.2 Lower corner, title-page of the Pantagrueline Prognostication 387 15.3 Prologue to the Pantagrueline Prognostication, printed on the opposite side of the title-page of the Prognostication 388 15.4 Pantagrueline Prognostication, end of chapter five [fol. iv v] 391 15.5 Pantagrueline Prognostication, title page, detail 391 15.6 Pantagrueline Prognostication, final page and tailpiece [fol. v r] 394 15.7 Lorenzo Spirito, Le livre de passe temps (Lyon: François Juste, 1532), title-page 396 15.8 Le livre de passe temps, verso of title-page 397

Abbreviations of the Most Common Journals 16S ar bhr crmh er ff jmrs R&R rer rhlf rhr rq R&R rr rss scj

Seizième siècle L’Année rabelaisienne Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes Études rabelaisiennes French Forum Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies Renaissance et Réforme Revue des études rabelaisiennes Revue de l’histoire littéraire de la France Réforme Humanisme Renaissance Renaissance Quarterly Renaissance et Réforme Romanic Review Revue du Seizième siècle Sixteenth Century Journal

Notes on Contributors Tom Conley Affiliated with the Departments of Art, Film & Visual Studies and Romance Languages, Tom Conley, the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor at Harvard University, studies cartography, literature, and film theory. He is author of À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (2016), An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France (2011), Cartographic Cinema (2007), The Self-Made Map (2007/1996), L’Inconscient graphique (2000), and other titles. He is co-editor of the Wylie-Blackwell Companion to Jean-Luc Godard (2014) and the Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory (2018). François Cornilliat François Cornilliat is Distinguished Professor of French at Rutgers University— New Brunswick and a specialist of 15th- and 16th-century French poetry. His publications in this field include “Or ne mens.” Couleurs de l’ Éloge et du Blâme chez les “Grands Rhétoriqueurs” (Paris: Champion, 1994), and Sujet caduc, noble sujet. La poésie de la Renaissance et le choix de ses “arguments” (Geneva: Droz, 2009). He is currently finishing, in collaboration with the historian Laurent Vissière, a critical edition of Jean Bouchet’s Panegyric du Chevallier sans reproche, to be published by Éditions Classiques Garnier, and has written a couple of articles on the Panegyric’s presence in Pantagruel and Gargantua. Marie-Luce Demonet Professor of French Renaissance literature most recently at the University of Tours (2001–2016), Marie-Luce Demonet is emerita since 2016. She was Dean of the Center for Renaissance Studies in Tours (2003–2007) and director of the Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities of the Loire Valley (OrléansTours, 2012–2014). Corresponding fellow of the British Academy, she studies the connections between literature, languages, and semiotic theories (Les Voix du signe, 1992, A plaisir, 2002, Rabelais et la question du sens (dir.), 2011). She published more than two hundred articles and essays on Rabelais, Montaigne, and various Renaissance authors. Head of the “Virtual Humanistic Libraries” program (2002–2016), and of the “Montaigne at work project” (2011–2014), she develops scholarly digital scholarly editions on the Epistemon website, while preparing books about the status of fiction, language, and proof in Renaissance genres.

xii

notes on contributors

Diane Desrosiers James McGill Professor in Renaissance Studies, Diane Desrosiers teaches 16th Century French Literature at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Former President of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ishr, 2007– 2009), she has published numerous texts dealing with the rhetoric of women writers of the 16th and the 17th centuries. Specialist of Rabelais’s works, she is the author of Rabelais et l’humanisme civil (Droz, 1992) and has also published, in collaboration, Rabelais et l’hybridité des récits rabelaisiens (Droz, 2017). She is a Member of the Royal Society of Canada. Mireille Huchon Mireille Huchon is professor emerita at Sorbonne University and member of the Institut universitaire de France. She edited Rabelais’s Complete Works for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. She is also the author of Rabelais grammairien: De l’histoire du texte aux problèmes d’inauthenticité (Geneva, 1981), of the most recent biography of Rabelais (Paris, 2011), of numerous articles and studies on 16th-century language and literature, and founder and director of the journal L’Année rabelaisienne. Elsa Kammerer Elsa Kammerer teaches French Renaissance literature at the University of Lille and is currently a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure, Paris and a former fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Recently, she directed the international Eurolab project, studying the dynamics of vernacular languages in Renaissance Europe, De lingua et linguis. She is currently studying the first German transposition of Rabelais’s Gargantua, largely unknown in France, published between 1575 and 1590 by the Strasbourg scholar Johann Fischart. Jelle Koopmans Jelle Koopmans teaches French literature at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands). His research is centered around dramatic culture in the 15th and 16th centuries; in 2011 he published the 53 farces from the Recueil de Florence and is currently working, with Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès and Katell Lavéant, on an edition of the French sotties (vol. 1 published in Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2014). Recent major projects that he directed include Regional Cultures and Local Subcultures and Law and Drama. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (knaw).

notes on contributors

xiii

Claude La Charité Claude La Charité is holder of the Canada Research Chair in Literary History and Printed Heritage (Tier 1). He is Professor in the Department of Letters and Humanities at the University of Quebec in Rimouski. Author of La Rhétorique épistolaire de Rabelais (Nota bene, 2003), and the forthcoming Rabelais éditeur du Pronostic. “La voix véritable d’Hippocrate” to be published by Classiques Garnier in Paris, he is also a member of the editorial board of the journal L’ Année rabelaisienne. Nicolas Le Cadet Nicolas Le Cadet teaches French literature of the 16th century at the University Paris-Est Créteil—Val-de-Marne and is a member of the editorial board of the journal L’Année rabelaisienne. He is the author of L’ Évangélisme fictionnel. Les Livres rabelaisiens, le Cymbalum Mundi, L’Heptaméron (1532–1552) (Classiques Garnier, 2010) and of Rabelais et le théâtre (Classiques Garnier, 2020) as well as the co-author of Rabelais, Quart Livre (Atlande, 2011) and of Gargantua (Atlande, 2017). Frank Lestringant Frank Lestringant is Professor Emeritus at Sorbonne University. He has widely published on French literature of all periods. His main contributions to early modern literature are in the fields of travel literature and the writings and polemics of the French Wars of Religion, to which he contributed uncountable monographs, editions, book chapters, and articles (see for example Le Livre des îles: Atlas et récits insulaires de la genèse à Jules Verne, Geneva, 2002, and Le Huguenot et le sauvage, Geneva, 2004). Daniel Ménager Daniel Ménager was Emeritus Professor of French at the University ParisNanterre. He published widely on all aspects of French Renaissance literature, from his influential Introduction à la vie littéraire du xvie siècle (Paris, 1968), his important work on Ronsard and Erasmus, his monographs on Renaissance laughter, on the image of the “night,” or on the pastoral, to his contributions to Rabelais scholarship (Rabelais en toutes lettres, Paris, 1989). Romain Menini Romain Menini teaches at the University Gustave-Eiffel. His research focuses on French Renaissance literature and humanist philology. He is the author of two books on Rabelais: Rabelais et l’intertexte platonicien (Genève, Droz, 2009) and Rabelais altérateur. “Græciser en François” (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2014,

xiv

notes on contributors

which was awarded the Prix Georges-Dumézil 2015 by the Académie française). He is a member of the editorial bord of the journal L’ Année rabelaisienne and secretary of the Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France. Gérard Milhe Poutingon Gérard Milhe Poutingon is Professor of Language and Stylistics of the 16th century at the University of Rouen. In addition to the Works of Rabelais (see, for example, François Rabelais: Bilan critique, Paris, 1996), his research focuses mainly on the language, rhetoric, and poetics of the 16th century. Jean-Charles Monferran Jean-Charles Monferran is professor of 16th-century French literature at Sorbonne University in Paris. His work is particularly concerned with poetry and poetics (see, for example, his edition of Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue françoyse, Geneva, 2001), with Rabelais, and with the reception of the Renaissance until today. John Parkin John Parkin is Emeritus Professor of French Literary Studies at the University of Bristol, where he worked for 39 years teaching French literature and language. He studied in the 1960s at the universities of Oxford and Glasgow before embarking on an academic career during which he has produced books on Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre and Henry Miller, as well as investigating various aspects of the theory and practice of humor. He lives in Bristol in retirement with his wife Eileen. They have two grown-up daughters and two grandchildren. Jeff Persels Jeff Persels teaches in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of South Carolina. He has edited, co-edited, and contributed to volumes on early modern scatology, religious polemic, theatre, and ecocriticism and authored a number of related articles. Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou is Professor of French language of the 16th century at Sorbonne University. She specializes in Ronsard (L’ Imaginaire cosmologique de Ronsard, Geneva, Droz, 2002), 16th-century poetry, and Rabelais (Panurge comme lard en pois. Paradoxe, scandale et propriété dans le Tiers Livre, Geneva, Droz, 2013). Her work focuses on the relationship between literature and representations both cosmological (Ronsard and the Pléiade)

notes on contributors

xv

and political-religious (Erasmus, Rabelais, Calvin), issues of convenience and inconvenience, the poetics of the Pléiade dictionaries (La Porte), and the language of Rabelais and his imitators. She is a member of the reading committee of Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance and Etudes Rabelaisiennes. Michael Randall Michael Randall is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. He is the author of Building Resemblance: Analogical Imagery in the Early French Renaissance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and The Gargantuan Polity: On the Community and the individual in the French Renaissance (University of Toronto Press, 2008). Bernd Renner Bernd Renner is Professor of French at the cuny Graduate Center and Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brooklyn College, where he held the Bernard H. Stern Chair in Humor Studies (2007–2009). He has published widely on early modern French and European literature and culture, most notably “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne (Geneva, 2007) and the collective volume La Satire dans tous ses états: Le “meslange satyricque” à la Renaissance française (Geneva, 2009). He is currently working on book-length studies on early modern satire in France and in Europe. Paul J. Smith Paul J. Smith is Emeritus Professor of French literature at Leiden University. He has widely published on 16th-, 17th-, and 20th-century French literature, its reception in the Netherlands, French and Dutch fable and emblem books, literary rhetoric, intermediality, and early modern zoology. His main book publications include Voyage et écriture. Étude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (1987), Dispositio. Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (2007), as well as the edited collection Éditer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges (1997), and, most recently, the co-edited volumes Langues hybrides. Expérimentations linguistiques et littéraires (2019) and Early Modern Catalogues of Imaginary Books (2020). Walter Stephens Walter Stephens is Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His areas of publication are early modern Italian and French narrative, literary forgery, and the literature of witchcraft and demonology. His current project is titled It Is Written: How Writing Made Us Human.

xvi

notes on contributors

Marie-Claire Thomine Marie-Claire Thomine is a Professor at Lille University. She publishes on French Renaissance literature and language, focusing on narrative literature, dialogue, and comic works. She is the author of books and articles about Marguerite de Navarre, Du Fail, Des Périers, Rabelais, Ronsard and, with Sabine Lardon, of a Grammaire du français de la Renaissance (Classiques Garnier, 2009) as well as a of critical edition of Du Fail’s Contes et Discours d’ Eutrapel (Paris, 2019).

introduction

Why Read Rabelais Now? Bernd Renner

C’est pourquoy fault ouvrir le livre: et soigneusement peser ce que y est deduict.1

… The problem is how to make the fruits of scholarship accessible to the reader who wants to read Rabelais with that peculiarly satisfying pleasure which comes from understanding.2

∵ Rabelais is a difficult read, at least if one refuses to fall into the trap of reducing his texts either to a few well-known saucy episodes and anecdotes, which have dominated his popular image for centuries, or to certain chapters supposedly constituting serious humanist manifestos such as the famous letter on education (Pantagruel, ch. 8). The generic hybridity of his writings, the unusual combination, at least from our modern point of view, of complex, encyclopedic erudition, popular laughter, and graphic obscenity is disconcerting, even frustrating to modern readers, as they attempt to gain access to his universe.3 It often makes them miss the brilliance of his art, the wittiness of his observations, and the rhetorical mastery of his style. All these factors are at the service of Rabelais’s timeless ‘lessons’ that touch upon all spheres of human 1 Gargantua, prologue, 6. cw 4: That is why you must open the book and carefully consider what is expounded in it. For the editions of reference, Mireille Huchon’s Pléiade edition for the French version (oc) and Donald Frame’s English translation (cw), see the comments at the end of this introduction. 2 Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca: 1979), xi. 3 Three major studies address these tendencies: Floyd Gray, Rabelais et le comique du discontinu (Paris: 1994); Guy Demerson, Humanisme et Facétie: Quinze études sur Rabelais (Orléans, Caen: 1994); Diane Desrosiers, Claude La Charité, Christian Veilleux, and Tristan Vigliano (eds.), Rabelais et l’ hybridité des récits rabelaisiens, (er) 56 (Geneva: 2017).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_002

2

renner

life and often clad their important moral or ethical teachings in his trademark seriocomical context. Pleasure and profit are in a unique symbiosis in the Rabelaisian text, as the author himself stresses in the very first line of his Pantagruelian Chronicles (verse 1 of the introductory poem to the first book of the series published as Pantagruel): “… both teach and entertain.” The contributions to this Companion will attempt to demonstrate why it is still important to read Rabelais diligently and profoundly in our times, as much can still be learned from his characteristic synthesis of wisdom and laughter. “Rabelais for the 21st century” was the title of the proceedings of an international symposium published in the prestigious journal Études rabelaisiennes some twenty years ago.4 Several decades into this 21st century, one can happily confirm that the interest in François Rabelais and his work is reaching new peaks: research abounds and touches on all aspects related to the humanist, (secular) monk, and doctor from Chinon in the Touraine region; material remnants of his life are being discovered and analyzed while even some of his lost writings and books that he annotated are rediscovered; new directions in literary scholarship are pursued, and sources and influences dissected in impressive philological undertakings.5 Rabelais’s popularity and relevance are most clearly illustrated by the fact that three series are devoted to the his œuvre: the aforementioned flourishing Études rabelaisiennes, published by the Librairie Droz in Geneva since 1953, which offers a mixture of Varia volumes, conference proceedings, thematic volumes, and monographs, are complemented by the more recent and similarly conceived Les Mondes de Rabelais and, since 2017, the annual journal L’ Année rabelaisienne, both published at Éditions Classiques Garnier in Paris.6 Such abundant activity attests to the health of Rabelais studies some 120 years after the initial attempt at a journal devoted to the Tourangeau author, the Revue 4 Michel Simonin (ed.), Rabelais pour le xxie siècle. Actes du Colloque du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Chinon-Tours, 1994, (er) 33 (Geneva: 1998). 5 To mention only a few of the many recent publications in all these domains, building largely on the groundwork provided by the decades of scholarship mostly disseminated through the Études rabelaisiennes, one could list the new biography by Mireille Huchon, Rabelais (Paris: 2012); Romain Menini, Rabelais altérateur: “Græciser en françoys” (Paris: 2014); Claude La Charité’s forthcoming study on Rabelais as an editor of medical treatises; Alessandro VitaleBrovarone’s stunning discovery of nine copies of Rabelais’s Almanach pour l’an m.d.xxxv (Paris: 2014); or finally the rediscovery in Russia of Rabelais’s fictional writings published in 1533 by François Juste in Lyons and vanished from Dresden after the Second World War, Chronicques du grant Roy Gargantua, Pantagruel, Pantagrueline prognostication, eds. A. ParentCharron and O. Pédeflous (Paris: 2018). 6 One should not neglect to mention the more regional Bulletin de l’Association des amis de Rabelais et de la Devinière, published annually since 1951.

why read rabelais now?

3

des Études rabelaisiennes, active from 1903 to 1912, before it become the more general Revue du Seizième Siècle. The vast majority of scholarship is published in French in these series; at the same time, the demand for sources and accessible critical material in English seems at an all-time high. In the following pages, it will be impossible to refer to all the important work on Rabelais from the last decades, as the scholarly production is truly worthy of an œuvre featuring giants, in all respects of the term. After all, few authors have influenced world literature to the extent that François Rabelais has or have attracted as much critical attention as he has. For practical reasons, it is therefore inevitable to leave a few blanks in the concise critical overview to follow. The references will be limited to an enumeration of several fundamental book-length studies, collective volumes, and articles. The general bibliography at the end of this Companion provides a larger picture of the truly encyclopedic scope of the scholarship devoted to this canonical author. The exclusion of many excellent contributions to Rabelais criticism from the following observations is therefore by no means an indicator of their value but solely due to the limits of these succinct opening remarks. The first two books, Pantagruel and Gargantua (rather than the following installments), are increasingly present in university courses taught in English, even more so as foreign language departments are under pressure in Anglophone universities to increase the number of courses covering world literature in translation, in many ways complementing the offerings in comparative literature departments. A new translation by Michael A. Screech (2006), including some minor texts, is widely accessible in affordable paperback format from Penguin, offering ample notes and a synopsis of each chapter. Screech chose, however, to translate the first editions of the first two books, with variants from the 1542 definitive editions presented in the introductory synopsis to each chapter, in brackets in the text, or in footnotes, which complicates the reading somewhat. Older editions, by J.M. Cohen, also at Penguin (1955), by Donald M. Frame, at the University of California Press (1991), Samuel Putnam’s 1929 translation, reedited in 1946 by Viking Books, or even Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux’s 17th-century version, the first ever English translation and a particularly fascinating case of a creative adaptation of the original recently republished by Barnes & Noble Books (2005), are still widely circulating. And while there has been a large number of excellent monographs on Rabelais and various aspects of his work published in English in the last half century or so,7

7 To mention but a few of the most noteworthy ‘classic’ studies: George Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: 1969); Thomas M. Greene,

4

renner

the specific demand for up-to-date general introductions touching on particular aspects in a more compact format has been fairly strong, in particular in the last two decades. The present Companion is intended to complement and enrich the existing offerings of fairly concise recent critical material in English. In addition to the very practical Rabelais Encyclopedia, two excellent collective volumes in English have started to fill the critical void in the last decade, calling upon a wide array of outstanding Rabelais scholars: Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais, edited by Floyd Gray and Todd Reeser, and The Cambridge Companion to François Rabelais, under the direction of John O’Brien.8 Whereas the former volume, as its title indicates, is focused on pedagogy and proves extremely helpful in conveying these complex texts to the modern student—its fairly short contributions are not meant to further scholarship and provide only the most essential critical background—, a more research-oriented approach is the main objective that the latter collection is pursuing in impressive fashion in its eight chapters covering some of the main themes of the Rabelaisian chronicles. The only possible hint of criticism to be directed at the Cambridge volume is its brevity, inevitably leaving out many an important aspect of the Chinonais’ works. The present volume seeks to address such gaps and critical voids by providing a more exhaustive treatment of the Rabelaisian text, not only complementary to our predecessors’ work but also striving to integrate the most recent advances in the field. It is impossible, of course, to achieve a complete assessment of the myriad elements, topics, and critical directions that make Rabelais: A Study in Comic Courage (New York: 1970); Dorothy G. Coleman, Rabelais: A Critical Study in Prose Fiction (Cambridge: 1971); Barbara C. Bowen, The Age of Bluff: Paradox and Ambiguity in Rabelais and Montaigne (Urbana: 1972); Raymond C. La Charité, Recreation, Reflection and Re-Creation: Perspectives on Rabelais’s Pantagruel (Lexington: 1980); Deborah N. Losse, Rhetoric at Play: Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy (Bern: 1980); Carol Clark, The Vulgar Rabelais (Glasgow: 1983); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln-London: 1989); Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in Rabelais (Cambridge, Eng.: 1990); Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford: 1990); Carla Freccero, Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structure in Rabelais (Ithaca-London: 1991); Max Gauna, The Rabelaisian Mythologies (Madison: 1996). There are also a few collective volumes that reunite outstanding ‘rabelaisants’: James A. Coleman, Christine M. Scollen-Jimack (eds.), Rabelais in Glasgow (Glasgow: 1984); Raymond C. La Charité (ed.), Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on His Art (Lexington: 1986); Barbara C. Bowen (ed.), Rabelais in Context (Birmingham, al: 1993); Jean-Claude Carron (ed.), François Rabelais: Critical Assessments (Baltimore-London: 1995). 8 Elizabeth Chesney Zegura (ed.), The Rabelais Encyclopedia (Westport, CT-London: 2004); Todd Reeser and Floyd Gray (eds.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais (New York: 2011); John O’Brien (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais (Cambridge: 2011). See the bibliography for details on the English editions of Rabelais’s works.

why read rabelais now?

5

up Rabelais’s fictional writings and illustrate their complexity; our collection nonetheless aims to provide a wide-ranging introduction to this major author and a starting point for further research, from the undergraduate level to the most advanced tier of scholarly discourse. The three sections of the volume—sources, texts, influence/topics—strive to structure the critical approach to Rabelais in a fashion that favors an easily accessible overview and to unite established scholars and representatives of a new generation, who have already left their mark in the field, especially francophone scholars, whose work is usually not accessible in English. After a first chapter that puts Rabelais and his work into the context of his time, providing a much-needed general biographical, cultural, and literary update in English, the following chapters of the first section touch on the most important domains that influenced our author and help establish the literary and intellectual framework of his chronicles: medicine, religion, politics, classical sources, humanism, popular culture, literature of discovery, and theater. The second section then provides compact critical essays focusing on the main issues, themes, and concerns as they pertain to each of Rabelais’s five books. These chapters should be of particular interest for anyone in need of a concise overview of a specific installment of the series. They provide a first basic orientation for further investigation that is frequently developed further in the thematic chapters of sections one and three. They also facilitate access to Rabelais for readers who have only limited time to spend on his works, be that in an introductory literature course, in a very dense course on world literature, or in an overview of the Western literary canon, for instance. Such general essays centered on the individual books of the series are hard to come by for the Anglophone reader and should prove to be a particularly useful tool. Section three, finally, looks at an array of essential stylistic, linguistic, and epistemological characteristics, which account for Rabelais’s continuing influence and prominent position in world literature. They might also at times overlap marginally with some topics covered in the first section but hereby highlight the intricate network, intertextuality, and intratextuality of Rabelais’s writing as well as, by extension, the homogeneity of the collection and the diverse critical approaches of the contributors, providing complementary angles in assessing this complex œuvre. Appropriately, the last chapter mirrors the first in a sense by dealing with Rabelais’s posterity in a quite literal sense, covering translations and reception in a welcome update to Marcel De Grève’s groundbreaking studies.9 This coherent structure and the variety of topics covered

9 Marcel De Grève, L’ Interprétation de Rabelais au xvie siècle, (er) 3 (Geneva: 1961); Idem, La

6

renner

show the richness, the continuity, and the constant renewal of Rabelais scholarship in all its breadth, further distinguishing this Companion from similar ventures. In addition to being accessible to students, instructors, and specialists alike, the essays aim at the same time at providing a rich and varied panorama of the Rabelaisian text, of the most recent scholarship, including its controversies and fresh approaches, as well as of the issues that could be addressed by future scholars and teachers, whether or not they are capable of reading the text in the original, in a modernized French version, or in English translation. In the words of Michael A. Screech and as idealistic as it might seem, the objective was to place Rabelais’s writings into their “fullest intellectual, historical and aesthetic context”10 while drawing on the latest scholarly advances and studies in order to provide the best possible tool to readers better to understand, appreciate, investigate, and, of course, enjoy the writings of this giant of the European Renaissance. To sum up, the present collection aims to contribute to the considerable effort to bridge the gap between Rabelais’s time and ours, even though this process is obviously never entirely successful, nor is it even desirable to achieve this kind of perfect assimilation. A healthy dose of destabilization on the part of the reader is a necessary, inspirational, and fertile ingredient of the exegetic process after all, shedding new light on many issues that inform our own thinking as we cope with contemporary problems. As much as we can recreate the cultural, historical, or linguistic context of the time, there will always be unanswered questions, but volumes such as this will help to reduce these gray zones considerably and unlock the important lessons that such essential texts can teach us. In addition to this contextualization, there is also another vital aspect to be considered, however, when dealing with a masterpiece of world literature, which is the virtuosity and sheer mastery of the art that is displayed in Rabelais’s work, the famous “inexhaustible barrel” of meaning (Third Book, prologue; cw, 259) that still intrigues casual readers, students, and scholars—Rabelais’s hermeneutic marvel as one might

10

réception de Rabelais en Europe du xvie au xviiie siècle, eds. C. De Grève and J. Céard (Paris: 2009). See also Paul J. Smith (ed.), Éditer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges (AmsterdamAtlanta: 1997). Rabelais, xv. Our undertaking mirrors the mission that John O’Brien expressed so eloquently in his introduction to the Cambridge Companion, 2, that is “to help present-day readers overcome [the] sense of alienation and possibly discomfort or even frustration by providing the practical tools they need to acquaint themselves with an unfamiliar intellectual landscape.”

7

why read rabelais now?

call it.11 Lastly, our Companion should also be of interest to francophone readers, scholars, and teachers, similarly to the mla and Cambridge collectives, as no comprehensive offering similar to those three volumes is currently available in French.12 The best English-language introduction to Rabelais’s works is still Michael A. Screech’s seminal Rabelais, masterfully blending accessible but nevertheless erudite readings of Rabelais’s œuvre, including many minor texts, with the indispensable historical background.13 There is also an English translation of Jean Plattard’s groundbreaking 1928 biography, which is still worth reading, as well as Donald Frame’s more recent general study that reserves individual chapters to “The Times,” “The Life,” each of the five books, and some major themes.14 In French, there is a rich array of readable bio-bibliographical accounts, in particular the volumes by Madeleine Lazard, by Guy Demerson, and especially the latest study by Mireille Huchon, who integrates many recent findings into her portrait of the Chinonais humanist, some of which are reflected in her contribution opening the present volume.15 Students and scholars will also profit immensely from the monumental Rabelais bibliography compiled by Guy Demerson and Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, which lists well over 5,000 critical studies on our author, from the beginnings to 2006.16

∵ 11 12

13 14

15 16

O’Brien, Cambridge Companion, 1–2, judiciously distinguishes between “alienation” and “defamiliarization” when discussing some of the issues outlined in this paragraph. Recent volumes on separate instalments of Rabelais’s series have been published in French, most of which conceived to prepare candidates for the selective agrégation examinations: Nicholas Le Cadet and Adeline Desbois-Ientile, Gargantua (Paris: 2017); Myriam Marrache-Gouraud (ed.), Rabelais aux confins des mondes possibles: Quart Livre (Paris: 2011); Nicholas Le Cadet and Olivier Halévy, Quart Livre (Paris: 2011); Nathalie Dauvois and Jean Vignes (eds.), En relisant le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Cahiers Textuel) 35 (2012); MarieLuce Demonet and Stéphan Geonget (eds.), Un joyeux quart de sentences (er) 52 (Geneva: 2012); Franco Giacone (ed.), Langue et sens du Quart Livre (Paris: 2012); Stéphan Geonget (ed.), “Ces belles billevesées”: Études sur le Gargantua (er) 58 (Geneva: 2019); Nicolas Le Cadet and Romain Menini (eds.), “ ‘Quand fut au poinct de lire le chapitre’: Études sur le Gargantua,” in ar 3 (2019): 17–187. Screech, Rabelais. Jean Plattard, The Life of François Rabelais, trans. L.P. Roche (New York: 1931); Donald M. Frame, François Rabelais: A Study (New York-London: 1977). Unlike Screech’s study, both volumes include the Fifth Book. Guy Demerson, François Rabelais (Paris: 1991); Madeleine Lazard, Rabelais L’Humaniste (Paris: 1993); Huchon, Rabelais (Paris: 2011). Demerson and Marrache-Gouraud (eds.), François Rabelais (Bibliographie des écrivains

8

renner

The current ‘golden age’ of Rabelais scholarship traces its roots in part to the beginning of the 20th century that saw the publication of the aforementioned eleven volumes of the Revue des études rabelaisiennes (1903–1911) as well as, subsequently, other groundbreaking endeavors, such as the incomplete critical edition of the Œuvres, edited by Abel Lefranc and his illustrious team as well as Lazare Sainéan’s La Langue de Rabelais (1922–1923), and, finally, Lucien Febvre’s Le Problème de l’incroyance au xvie siècle: La Religion de Rabelais (1942), to name only three of the most outstanding examples. The definitive breakthrough was made in 1953 with a volume celebrating the 400th anniversary of Rabelais’s death, a volume that led to the foundation of the Études rabelaisiennes series. Fairly quickly, Rabelais scholarship experienced the beginnings of an academic feud that would nourish and fertilize the field of 16th-century studies for decades to come. The strictly philological bent of the commemorative 1953 volume triggered Leo Spitzer’s famous rant against what he called the “rabelaisants,” scholars who placed the emphasis on the purely philological study of the text, on its sources and influences, with little or no regard for its esthetic or poetic qualities.17 Many controversies have marked Rabelais scholarship since this famous mid-20th-century clash, often functioning as a microcosm for larger questions in early-modern studies that could be illustrated particularly well in the exemplary works of the greatest prose writer of the time. To name but a few outstanding examples, debates have flourished around Rabelais’s religion with the long-held argument favoring the author’s alleged atheism being definitely put to rest as late as 1942 with Lucien Febvre’s seminal study, whose claim of Rabelais’s Catholic orthodoxy paved the way for a more thorough exploration of the Chinonais’ evangelism. This stance was the basis of our author’s intermediate position between the Church of Rome and Calvinism that earned him attacks from both sides and which is reflected most clearly in the religious satire of the Fourth Book.18 Mikhail Bakhtin’s groundbreaking work on Rabelais and his world opened up fresh new venues (the importance of the carnivalesque

17

18

français) 32 (Rome-Paris: 2010). The more modest but more frequently updated critical bibliography of the author on the platform “Oxford Bibliographies Online” (ed. B. Renner) is also of interest, especially for titles that appeared after 2006. François Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort. 1553–1953 (Geneva: 1953); Leo Spitzer, “Rabelais et les ‘rabelaisants’,” Studi francesi iv (1960): 401–423, repr. Études de style (Paris: 1970), 134–165. Le Problème de l’ incroyance au xvie siècle: La Religion de Rabelais (Paris: 1942, repr. 1968). For a more nuanced analysis, see Screech, L’ Évangélisme de Rabelais: Aspects de la satire religieuse au xvie siècle, (er) 2 (Geneva: 1959). See also Étienne Gilson, “Rabelais franciscain,” in Les idées et les lettres (Paris: 1932), 197–241.

why read rabelais now?

9

and of the grotesque, of the inverted world, of the lower bodily stratum) that proved highly productive despite the obvious anachronistic bent of the Russian formalist’s approach, which was reflected most clearly in his ill-conceived attempt to separate official culture strictly from popular culture in the Renaissance. This artificial separation was above all a veiled attack on the totalitarian Soviet regime that lurked behind his critical reading.19 And finally, one needs to mention the role of modern and postmodern literary and linguistic theories, a trend that initially informed mostly Anglo-Saxon approaches to Rabelais’s work and early modernity, negotiating yet again the fine line between the promise of fresh, new insights and anachronistic appropriation.20 It was this trend, however, that first helped to transcend the entrenched critical positions, which had perceived Rabelais’s writings predominantly in conventional terms of antithesis and which had largely dominated the scholarly discourse in France.21 As an example, see Richard Berrong’s judicious assessment and adjustment of certain aspects of Bakhtin’s influential theses mentioned above, advocating in favor of the inclusive nature of early modern culture. The tendency toward binary oppositions also played a role in the more recent incarnations of the scholarly quarrel launched by Leo Spitzer, first and

19

20

21

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: 1984). See Richard Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel (Lincoln: 1986), for the strengths and weaknesses of Bakhtin’s study. In passing, let us not forget Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics that also contributed considerably to early modern scholarship. See the concise recapitulation of these aspects in the foreword to the second edition of François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: 1996), *1–*10. See also Tristan Vigliano, Humanisme et juste milieu au siècle de Rabelais (Paris: 2009), 523–567, a study underscoring the critical move toward mediocritas, the synthesis of antithetical scholarly positions; consult the detailed analysis of the major critical tendencies of 20th-century Rabelais scholarship by Nicolas Le Cadet, “Rabelais et les rabelaisants: Pour une histoire des querelles critiques au xxe siècle,” ar 1 (2017): 33–83. Another famous collective volume gives an overview over the most important critical directions just prior to the outbreak of the “positivism vs. polysemy” dispute: Jean Céard and Jean-Claude Margolin (eds.), Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984 (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988). See the non-exhaustive list of binary oppositions that illustrate this antithetical approach in Le Cadet’s recapitulation of the critical quarrels that marked the 20th century in “Rabelais et les rabelaisants”: Rabelais réaliste vs. Rabelais poète; Rabelais athée vs. Rabelais croyant; Rabelais publiciste royal vs Rabelais anarchiste; Rabelais antiféministe vs. Rabelais féministe; Rabelais humaniste vs. Rabelais populaire; Rabelais militant vs. Rabelais hésuchiste; Rabelais cratylien vs. Rabelais conventionnaliste; Rabelais univoque et transparent vs. Rabelais pluriel et ambigu; Rabelais architecte vs. Rabelais discontinu; Rabelais ésotérique vs. Rabelais exotérique.

10

renner

foremost in the initially heated and now legendary exchange that turned into a seemingly more playful confrontation between the proponents of what has been labeled, in a somewhat simplistic fashion, the approaches of “positivism,” on the one hand, and of “polysemy,” on the other.22 This confrontation embodies many of the aforementioned critical dichotomies and has had a lasting impact on Rabelais scholarship in particular and on early-modern studies in general, a status which calls for a succinct recapitulation of its broad lines at this point. Many of these issues will resurface in much more detail and in specific contexts in the different contributions to this Companion.23 The immediate trigger of the dispute was a 1985 article by Edwin M. Duval in Études rabelaisiennes, which Gérard Defaux used that same year to proclaim with his customary force of conviction—which often displayed ludic tendencies, however—that Duval’s demonstration was the key to the one true altior sensus intended by Rabelais.24 Duval had indeed pointed out some substantial misreadings of the programmatic prologue to Gargantua, convincingly resolving the apparent contradiction between the praise of hidden meanings and their subsequent apparent refusal, an alleged “incompatibility” that had generally perplexed most critics. This paved the way, most likely unintentionally, for Defaux’s polemical affirmations and dismissal of what he calls the “Derridean

22

23

24

The proponents of “positivism” and a univocal altior sensus, such as Gérard Defaux, Michael A. Screech, or Edwin Duval, were in a “joust” against the “valiant champions” (Defaux’s terms) of copia and polysemy, first and foremost Michel Jeanneret, François Rigolot, or Terence Cave, even though their contention was based more on a misreading of the others group’s allegedly uncompromising position than on real incompatibility, as one is tempted to concede in hindsight. In a more general context, consult their exchange in the pages of the rhlf (1985/86). See Defaux’s implicit reconciliation of the two attitudes, “Du mythe des ‘paroles gelées’ à l’ île des ‘voleurs et larrons’: Rabelais et le symbolisme polémique” in Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophète. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua et Le Quart Livre, (er) 32 (Geneva: 1997), 534: “le dégel suppose nécessairement un gel antérieur, la polyvalence ne saurait exister sans l’ imposition préalable d’un sens sinon fixe et unique, du moins dominant.” One could argue that this “dégel” is precisely the satirical “cure” that Rabelais applies to the exclusivity of a fixed and unique sense, this univocal exegesis at the basis of abuse and manipulation by religious and political authorities. See also Defaux’s preceding section, “Rabelais, le Quart Livre et la crise gallicane de 1551: Satire et allégorie,” in Rabelais agonistes, 455–515. The aforementioned summaries by Rigolot and Le Cadet provide ample critical discussions of the main concerns, as do the introductions to the collective volumes by Gray and Reeser and by O’Brien, that exceed the scope and intent of these introductory remarks. Duval, “Interpretation and the ‘doctrine absconce’ of Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua,” er 18 (1985): 1–17; Defaux, “D’ un problème l’ autre: Herméneutique de l’altior sensus et captatio lectoris dans le Prologue de Gargantua,” rhlf (1985): 195–216.

why read rabelais now?

11

tendencies” of Anglo-Saxon critics.25 Duval in turn profited from his expert demonstration to insinuate that his grammatically more accurate reading was the key to the only correct deciphering of the hidden meaning of what was essentially a Christian epic, laying the groundwork for his important books on the “design” of three of the four authentic chronicles.26 As enlightening as this important reading is, the critic subordinated all other contexts and approaches to his exclusively evangelical framework, neglecting, for example, the intentionally complex syntax (with an intricate play on multiple negations) or some more subtle points of grammar that render the prologue far more complex than Duval’s seemingly coherent interpretation would have us believe. Rabelais’s text is certainly too complex and too intricate to surrender to such tempting all-encompassing readings. The profoundly erudite studies of the proponents of this so-called “positivism” have undeniably furthered and enhanced Rabelais scholarship immensely. However, the pretension of providing the only valid path to the sole ‘correct’ reading of the Rabelaisian chronicles based entirely on one critical angle, be that philology, erudition, or design,27 rather than allowing for a

25 26

27

Defaux, “D’ un probléme l’ autre,” 215, which decries the “image nécessairement réductrice et décentrée” of such approaches. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven: 1991); The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 34 (Geneva: 1997); The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 36 (Geneva: 1998). Among many other studies, Screech’s L’Evangélisme de Rabelais, his Rabelais, as well as Defaux’s Pantagruel et les sophistes. Contribution à l’ histoire de l’ humanisme chrétien au xvie siècle (The Hague: 1973), his Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne: L’écriture comme présence (Paris: 1987), and finally Rabelais agonistes are major examples of this approach. In the opposing camp, one needs to mention Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais; Le Texte de la Renaissance: Des rhétoriqueurs à Montaigne (Geneva: 1982); Cave, The Cornucopian Text. Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: 1979); Michel Jeanneret, Le défi des signes: Rabelais et la crise de l’interprétation à la Renaissance (Orléans: 1994). See Duval’s introductory comments in the last book of his series, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre, 11, nonchalantly dismissing all readings differing from his “design” as necessarily incoherent and invalid, which is not to say that his reading is erroneous but his claim of exclusivity certainly is: “Each episode [of the Quart Livre] has its place and function within in a single overarching design that not only confers meaning on all the episodes of the book but guides us in their interpretation. If we read these episodes as more or less autonomous ‘texts’ or as more or less interchangeable pieces in a ‘Menippean satire,’ then they will necessarily appear random, contradictory, and even indecipherable. But if we read them in their relation to one another and to the larger concerted work to which they belong, as integral parts of an organic whole, then they will reveal a coherent pattern, a meaning, and an intention—that is, a ‘design’ in the fullest sense of the word as I use it here.”

12

renner

broader approach integrating other equally valid readings, appears overly simplistic and amounts to a virtual relegation of important aspects of the text to the fringes, designating them as pure window dressing meant to obscure the one “true” interpretation instead of considering them an essential part of a larger, more inclusive, albeit elusive meaning. One concrete example is the dismissal of comedy, vulgarity, or obscenity, factors that are allegedly only meant to “mask” the serious “substantific marrow” hidden under these layers by the author.28 Similarly, some excesses of modern and postmodern theoretical approaches risk neglecting solid philological grounding as well as social and historical contexts, indispensable elements for any exegetic undertaking. These factors appear all the more important in the case of texts from a far-removed era, and their neglect would be a setback to scholarship.29 Now, Defaux’s attenuation of this previous claims in many pages of his Rabelais agonistes, the eminent critic’s summary and assessment of decades of reflections on Rabelais, shows his appreciation of the “fecund agreements and disagreements.” Such comments illustrate the general compatibility of the two approaches, a rich coincidentia oppositorum so to speak that developed over the following few decades and advanced early-modern scholarship in leaps and bounds. It informed many of the fresh approaches of the last decades, as did Rigolot’s aforementioned conciliating recapitulation in the foreword to the 1996 revised edition of his Langages de Rabelais, to name but one example from the other side of the famous divide.30 28

29

30

The expression was popularized by Defaux, “Rabelais et son masque comique: Sophista loquitur,” er 11 (1974): 89–135. This notion should be opposed to the concept of “steganographical” writing, popularized at the end of the 16th century in the works of François Béroalde de Verville; see most recently, Huchon, “Stéganographie rabelaisienne. Des endroits secrets désignés par le maître,” ar 1 (2017): 85–99. Most of the proponents of “polysemy,” including Cave, Jeanneret, and Rigolot, never claimed to neglect the value of solid philology, however. One example of a more extreme position would be Michel Beaujour, Le jeu de Rabelais (Paris: 1969), strongly marked by the discovery and early reception of Bakhtin; alongside many valid observations, Beaujour proclaims the superiority of the ludic Rabelais at the expense of erudition, displaying the other, equally problematic side of the antithetic coin that characterized much of Rabelais scholarship at the time. See also the opening paragraph of Rigolot’s original introduction, Les langages de Rabelais, 9, which insinuates this synthetic reading in paradoxically antithetical terms marked by the Spitzerian dispute as early as 1972: “On peut lire Rabelais pour y chercher un dessein caché, un aveu personnel déguisé, un message ésotérique. On peut le lire aussi, plus sérieusement sans doute, pour repérer les sources, expliquer les allusions obscures et mettre le vocabulaire sur fiches: c’ est l’ humble et patient travail du philologue, toujours à refaire, et qui fournit à l’ innocent lecteur des renseignements indispensables. Cependant Rabelais s’ avance toujours masqué, parce que son langage continue à nous étonner, à nous

why read rabelais now?

13

Erasmus’s influential treatise De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (1512) shows the problematic nature of such impositions of exclusive, all-encompassing authority in the light of the malleability of language that was so resourcefully exploited by early modern writers. In his important study of problems of writing in the French Renaissance, The Cornucopian Text, Terence Cave states judiciously: “By placing rhetoric under the aegis of this (essentially figurative) notion [of copia] in his enormously popular handbook De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, Erasmus adumbrates a theory of writing as an activity at once productive and open-ended, escaping the limits which formal treatises of rhetoric and dialectic attempt to impose on it.”31 It is this limitless productivity that explains the hermeneutic richness of an author such as Rabelais, who, after all, venerated Erasmus to the point of calling him his “mother and father” in a letter to the Dutch humanist dated from November 1532.32 The two humanists are keenly aware of the inherent dangers of any discourse overflowing with an abundance of ideas and words (obscurity, misinterpretation), as Erasmus underscores in the very first sentence of his treatise;33 hence Rabelais’s exhortation to “open the book and carefully consider what is expounded in it,” as he judiciously puts it in the groundbreaking manifest on exegesis that is the much discussed prologue of Gargantua. This issue would dominate Rabelais’s entire paratextual apparatus, as has been sketched out above, notably in the case of the “inexhaustible barrel” from the prologue of the Third Book or, even more consistently, in the anecdotes borrowed from the influential Greek cynic Lucian of Samosata that inform the prologues of the Third and the Fourth Books. Many chefs-d’œuvre of the Renaissance, and Rabelais’s in particular, are striving for a complex mediocritas of docere and delectare (i.e. a golden mean of instructing and entertaining) in their pursuit of a meaningful impact on their readers (movere), stressing the problematic status of language itself and the resulting exegetic responsibility of the careful readers. It must be underscored at this juncture that authorial intention is present and constitutes a fundamental layer of meaning, of course, but it is just as undeniable that this intended meaning is far from constituting the only acceptable reading of the text; rather, it is frequently multiplied, complemented,

31 32 33

fasciner. Cette œuvre, longtemps considérée comme une mine de renseignements plus ou moins camouflés, affirme sa résistance au déchiffrement.” Cave, The Cornucopian Text, xi. François Rabelais, oc, 998: “Patrem te dixi, matrem etiam dicerem, si per indulgentiam mihi id tuam liceret.” “There is nothing more admirable or more magnificent than a discourse overflowing, like a gilded river, with a rich abundance of thoughts and words; but this is certainly also something whose pursuit is not without risk.”

14

renner

or obscured for various reasons (protection from censorship; creative liberty; openness of the fictional universe; refusal of the author’s total control and responsibility; emancipation of the critical reader). Furthermore, authorial intent, were we able to clearly and unmistakably identify it in the first place, is also not the only possible way to make sense of texts that function as an illustration and an exploration of the unlimited and even potentially problematic power of language underscored in Erasmus’s treatise, a constant “défi des signes” (challenge of the linguistic sign), to borrow Michel Jeanneret’s term, directed at the readers. Such ambivalent, and often even intentionally ambiguous abundance (copia) is symbolized by the “living spring and the perpetual vein” of Rabelais’s “inexhaustible barrel,” meant to challenge the diligent reader. This is the context of the increasing number of complaints directed at malevolent readers in the peritexts of the Third and Fourth Books (complaining, for instance, about “the calumny of certain cannibals, misanthropes, agelastes against” the author; ql, liminary epistle, 519; cw, 423). These readers are unable or unwilling to decipher the Rabelaisian “palimpsest,” the complex, “vivid metaphors” of his chronicles, to use two pertinent modern critical approaches,34 and end up using their incompetence, self-interest, or malevolence to polemicize against our author. This remark takes us even further into the realm of reception theory, which Duval had mentioned in his seminal article and which has been one of the most influential factors in recent attempts to overcome the hermeneutic disagreements between the two critical approaches. In a way, the mere existence of the numerous critical debates underscores not only the vitality and continuing significance of the issues highlighted by Rabelais but also illustrates the central themes of reception and interpretation in and for the Rabelaisian project in general. As mentioned before, it is undeniable that Rabelais intended to transmit hidden meaning(s), as he states repeatedly, making judicious use of the veil of his serio ludere, most famously, of course, in the prologue to Gargantua. As mentioned above, the larger question, however, is to decide whether the attempt to decipher this authorial intent is the only acceptable hermeneutic approach and, furthermore, whether this alleged “true” sense is necessarily of an exclusively serious nature, hidden behind layers of “playfulness” (or, if this pun is allowed, the alleged but usually highly structured and refined “playful mess”) of various degrees (comedy, parody, vulgarity, obscenity, etc.)? If our reflections lead us back to this issue time and again in these pages, the main rea-

34

Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: 1982); Paul Ricœur, La Métaphore vive (Paris: 1975).

why read rabelais now?

15

son seems to be that these questions strike at the heart of general hermeneutic discussions, especially in an age that, not unlike our own, experienced a massive “crisis of exemplarity,” i.e. a radical questioning of traditional knowledge, received truths and absolute authority.35 As reception theory teaches us, such ambivalence is inevitable in a text that draws on sources and inspirations from all fields of knowledge, from all social, political, and historical backgrounds, and which, moreover, is composed by a magician of the verb of Rabelais’s stature.36 Even the most diligent reader will be put to the test facing such myriad textual constructs that exploit the potential of polysemy in the broadest possible sense. After all, it is the reader, and preferably the “ideal” reader, who assures the longevity, the a-temporality of a great piece of literature, which by definition inscribes its meaning in the inevitable ambiguity of the logos, carrying layers of meaning that, to a certain degree, adapt to the changing times as well as to the intellectual baggage and expertise of the respective readers.37 Consequently, textual interpretation becomes more complex, striving at grasping the multiple layers of meaning of texts that, furthermore, are apt to change with the times. These aspects have been recognized more and more forcefully in recent scholarship, usually taking the programmatic prologues as a point of departure.38

35

36 37

38

See Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca-London: 1990), and the special issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas, 59.4 (1998), with contributions by François Rigolot, Michel Jeanneret, Karlheinz Stierle, Timothy Hampton, and François Cornilliat. For reception theory, see above all Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore-London: 1974) and Hans-Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: 1978). This type of “intellectual digestion” is called for in Joachim Du Bellay’s famous manifest La Deffence, et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549) and it demonstrates the ambivalence of early modern writing by its obvious link to the very popular banquet literature. See Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance (Cambridge: 1991), and Timothy Tomasik and Juliann Vitullo (eds.), At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (asmar) 18 (Turnhout: 2007). For recent, more comprehensive assessments of the “quarrel” of the prologue of Gargantua, see Vigliano, “Pour en finir avec le prologue de Gargantua!,” Revue Analyses 3.3 (2008): 263–296; Le Cadet, “ ‘Beuveurs tresillustres, et vous verolez tresprecieux’: Rabelais et les anagnostes,” rhlf 115 (2015): 261–282. For the role of the reader and the evolution of Rabelais’s prologues, see Michel Charles, Rhétorique de la lecture (Paris: 1977), 33–58; Jeanneret, “La lecture en question: Sur quelques prologues comiques du seizième siècle,” ff 14.3 (1989): 279–289 (repr. Le défi des signes, 75–85); Frédéric Tinguely, “D’un prologue l’ autre: Vers l’ inconscience consciente d’ Alcofrybas Rabelais,” er 29 (1993): 83–91; Bernd Renner, “Changes in Renaissance Epistemology: The Dialogism of Rabelais’s Prologues” in Charting Change in France around 1540, ed. Marian Rothstein (Selinsgrove: 2006), 186–212.

16

renner

What was most striking in most of the scholarly debates sketched out in the preceding remarks was the need to distinguish clearly between an “erudite” and an “esthetic” Rabelais, between the scholar and the poet, so to say, or between the serious and the comical Rabelais, one, as mentioned before, being supposedly merely a mask for the other. Therefore, the antithetical approach, in its multiple variations, necessarily went hand in hand with a need to establish a firm hierarchy of meanings, a rigid and curious opposition evident in the brief overview of the “positivism vs. polysemy” dispute. This strategy does not seem to be endorsed by clear textual evidence, however, as our observations have insinuated. Yet again, the phrasing in the prologue of Gargantua seems to invite the less than diligent reader to draw such misleading conclusions: “And, even in case in the literal sense you find these matters rather jolly and corresponding to the name, you should not stop there […] but interpret in a higher sense what peradventure you thought was said casually” (cw 4). Not only is the narrator far from calling for the outright dismissal of the literal sense, he is explicitly favoring an extension of the exegetic effort toward the hidden higher meanings, through “careful reading and frequent meditation” (ibid.) in order to unearth fundamental religious, political, and domestic truths.39 These statements also seem influenced by the recent preface to an edition of the Romance of the Rose (1529–1530), often attributed to Clément Marot, that insists even more clearly on the importance of the literal sense that should not be despised or discarded, playing with the conventional topos of allegorical interpretation.40 It is therefore the synthesis of the different layers of meaning that appears to unlock the text’s lessons more fully. Moreover, Rabelais, in his own complex “game,” is frequently reacting to the lopsided reception of his seriocomical chronicles, starting with early critics of Pantagruel who dismissed the 1532 chronicle as unworthy of a serious author. His reaction is reflected prominently in the addition of the opening poem to the

39

40

For an earlier comparison between the first two prologues, see André Gendre, “Le Prologue de Pantagruel, le Prologue de Gargantua: Examen comparatif,” rhlf 74 (1974): 3–19. Frame’s translation is a bit incomplete here, as Rabelais covers the three domains of ethics (individual, family, society; see note 5 for p. 7 in oc 1064): “… bien aultre goust trouverez, et doctrine plus absconce, laquelle vous revelera de tres haultz sacremens et mysteres horrificques, tant en ce que concerne nostre religion, que aussi l’estat politicq et vie oeconomicque” (oc 7). “Cy est le romant de la roze,” in Clément Marot, Œuvres complètes ii, ed. F. Rigolot (Paris: 2009), 550–551: “Doncques qui ainsi vouldroit interpreter le Rommant de la rose, je dis qu’ il trouveroit grand bien proffit et utilité cachez soubz l’escorce du texte, qui pas n’est à despriser; car il y a double gaing, recreation d’esprit et plaisir delectable, quant au sens litteral, et utilité, quant à l’ intelligence morale.” (emphasis added)

why read rabelais now?

17

third edition of Pantagruel, countering such reproaches in the aforementioned very first verse of the poem which insists on the Horatian utile dulci mixtum (“If writers who both teach and entertain”).41 The insinuation of a hierarchy of senses in the above passage from the body of the prologue of Gargantua must therefore be taken with a grain of salt. Furthermore, let’s not forget either with what “devotion, care, fervor, and prudence” Rabelais’s metaphorical dog, “the most philosophical animal in the world,” as the narrator states with a reference to Plato’s Republic, handles the bone, i.e. the literal meaning, in the prologue before breaking it “with affection” to extract the allegorical marrow “with diligence.” (cw 4) The explicit classical reference should also be complemented with a sidelong glance at cynicism—a concept explicitly triggered by the presence of the philosophical dog. Cynicism was becoming increasingly popular at the time, and it seems a perfect fit for the Rabelaisian mindset, as it stresses the importance of critical thinking, independent from blind obedience to authorities; no surprise, therefore, that it leaves its mark throughout the Rabelaisian chronicles, not in the least via the constant presence of Lucian of Samosata.42 The famous prologue functions therefore as a blueprint for the complex exegetic strategies that are put in place throughout the Rabelaisian chronicles, insisting in a very Erasmian fashion on the duplicity and copia of the linguistic sign and advocating, it seems, in favor of a “golden mean,” a fertile middle ground between extreme hermeneutic positions. It is hardly surprising then that the notion of mediocritas is prevalent in the last of the authentic prologues, to the 1552 Fourth Book. This teleological development is visible throughout the series, for example in the final “serious” consultation of the Third Book (chap. 35–36). Calling on the “ephectic and Pyrrhonian philosopher” Trouillogan, the episode clearly insists on the synthetic qualities and potential varietas of diligent interpretation within the framework of cynicism. Not only does Trouillogan’s cryptic advice on Panurge’s allegorical marriage dilemma (“neither one and both at the same time”) indicate a reluctance toward exclusive,

41

42

The early reception of Gargantua was the exact opposite of the previous volume, most likely prompting Rabelais to add a poem to the second edition that stressed his ludic intention, culminating in the famous phrase “For it is laughter that becomes man best” (“Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’ homme”). Since we don’t have the title page of the first edition of Gargantua, there is a possibility, however, that the poem was present from the beginning. See Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais, 15–26. See De Grève’s aforementioned studies. See Claude-Albert Mayer, Lucien de Samosate et la Renaissance française (Geneva: 1984); Christiane-Lauvergnat-Gagnière, Lucien de Samosate et le lucianisme en France au xvie siècle: Athéisme et polémique (Geneva: 1988); and Menini, Rabelais altérateur.

18

renner

one-sided positions, the diverse interpretations provided by Gargantua, Pantagruel, and the two other authorities present, the theologian Hippothadée and the doctor Rondibilis, further demonstrate the breadth of acceptable exegetic approaches with none of the four experts claiming victory. In the last few decades Rabelais scholarship has moved more firmly toward such a critical middle ground, seemingly implied in the text itself and to which the famous 1980s debate has effectively drawn scholarly attention on a wider scale. A myriad of integrative approaches, combining erudition, philology, esthetic and poetic concerns, as well as polysemy and ambiguity, often within the framework of the non-hierarchical seriocomical hybrid,43 have dominated the attempts at exploring what André Tournon has so judiciously called the “agile sense” of Rabelais’s text, characterized by “exegetic contortions,” a trademark that the Chinonais mastered more brilliantly than virtually any other major author in the Western canon.44 The comical, even facetious mask has been rehabilitated, in a way, and turned into an integral part of the higher meaning, to which it contributes one of the indispensable, decisive layers. The resulting overarching tendency toward ambivalence is undeniable, the philological groundwork enhancing rather than restricting this tendency. It even seems increasingly present in Rabelais’s text, as illustrated by the more and more disconcerting, even grotesque, encounters that dominate the second half of the Fourth Book, starting with the description of Quaresmeprenant (ql 29– 32). Along those lines, a renewed focus on Rabelais’s minor writings and on the Fifth Book, far exceeding the debate on authenticity, have also enriched Rabelais scholarship.45 One could go as far as to claim that, due to their scope and outreach, these fruitful explorations mark a new era in the scholarly discourse on Rabelais, frequently putting the author into the larger context of early modern writing, as Cave’s Cornucopian Text had done in exemplary fashion. It is also Cave who presents a larger perspective of Tournon’s Rabelaisian preoccupations in his

43

44 45

See above all Demerson, Humanisme et Facétie; Gray, Rabelais et le comique du discontinu; Ariane Bayle, Romans à l’ encan: De l’ art du boniment dans la littérature au xvie siècle (Geneva: 2009). For an exemplary analysis of the seriocomical “Christian laughter,” see Michael A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: 1997). André Tournon, “En sens agile”: Les acrobaties de l’ esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: 1995). See Giacone (ed.), Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001). More recently, see Frank Lestringant, “‘L’isle sonante’ et la sphère du monde: À propos de sept dessins de ‘drôlerie’ attribués à Baptiste Pellerin,” in Illustrations inconscientes: Écritures de la Renaissance. Mélanges offerts à Tom Conley, eds. B. Renner and P.J. Usher (Paris: 2014), 93–119.

why read rabelais now?

19

two volume study Pré-Histoires, an in-depth look at early modern “troubled texts”—including Rabelais in a prominent position—which is preoccupied with epistemological, ontological, and axiological concerns.46 In general, the more recent approaches are often centered on a specific notion, issue, or genre, such as the paradox, perplexity, cynicism, militant and satirical writing, farce, eccentricity, linguistic concerns, sources, genre, Rabelais’s libraries and involvement in the printing business, or, finally his influence on later authors.47 They combine various critical approaches, many of which inform and enrich the contributions to this volume, in order to paint a more balanced picture of the Rabelaisian project. Beyond the author’s concrete and timeless concerns, be they in the realm of religion, of politics, or of society in general, it has become clear in the course of

46

47

Cave, Pré-Histoires: Textes troublés au seuil de la modernité (Geneva: 1999), and Pré-Histoires ii: Langues étrangères et troubles économiques au xvie siècle (Geneva: 2001). For another innovative approach, see Tom Conley, The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (Cambridge: 1992). In addition to the studies mentioned supra, here are some of the most important recent works covering these fields, including a few older groundbreaking titles: Oumelbanine Zhiri, L’ Extase et ses paradoxes: Essai sur la structure narrative du Tiers Livre (Paris: 1999); Stéphan Geonget, La Notion de perplexité à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2006); Michèle Clément, Le Cynisme à la Renaissance: D’ Érasme à Montaigne (Geneva: 2005); Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007); Le Cadet, L’ Évangélisme fictionnel: Les Livres rabelaisiens, le Cymbalum Mundi, L’Heptaméron (1532–1552) (Paris: 2010); E. Bruce Hayes, Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais (Aldershot: 2010); Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois. Paradoxe, scandale et propriété dans le Tiers Livre, (er) 53 (Geneva: 2013); Patricia Eichel-Lojkine, Excentricité et humanisme: Parodie, dérision et détournement des codes à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2002); Huchon, Rabelais grammairien: De l’ histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité, (er) 16 (Geneva: 1981); Marie-Luce Demonet, Les Voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris: 1992); Jean Céard and Franco Giacone (eds.), La langue de Rabelais et la langue de Montaigne. Actes du colloque de Rome, septembre 2003 (er) 48 (Geneva: 2008); Romain Menini, Rabelais et l’ intertexte platonicien, (er) 47 (Geneva: 2009); Michèle Clément and Pascale Mounier (eds.), Le Roman français au xvie siècle ou le renouveau d’un genre dans le contexte européen (Strasbourg: 2005); Pascale Mounier, Le Roman humaniste: Un genre novateur français, 1532–1564 (Paris: 2007); Marie-Claire Thomine-Bichard (ed.), Naissance du roman moderne (Paris: 2007); Raphaël Cappellen, “Feuilleter papiers, quotter cayers”: La citation au regard de l’eruditio ludere des fictions rabelaisiennes, PhD thesis (Tours: 2013); Olivier Pédeflous, Dans l’ atelier de Rabelais: Des recherches philologicoantiquaires à l’ archéologie de la geste de Pantagruel, PhD thesis (Paris: 2013); see also a special section on “Rabelais éditeur des anciens et des modernes,” in ar 2 (2018): 17–212, and sections on “Rabelais et sa postérité,” in ar 3 (2019): 189–382 and ar 4 (2020): 51– 265.

20

renner

these observations that we discern a general attempt to get to the root of all evil, which at the same time holds the key to any possible, yet elusive solution: the malleable and intrinsically ambivalent logos itself, stressed by the wordsmith Rabelais in his philologico-erudite “game.” As has been underscored throughout these pages, language denotes power and thus opens the door to beneficial or abusive usage—via communication and interpretation—depending on the intentions and the skills of its users.48 As it has become clear time and again, for example in the reference to Erasmus or in the complex prologues, language is a main concern of Rabelais’s, present in all aspects of the notions, themes, and critical directions reflected in his works. Copia and censorship are juxtaposed all throughout the text in a battle for the hegemony over meaning, and the issues examined by recent scholarship function as springboards for the exploration of Rabelais’s innovative and all-encompassing approach to such central concerns, be that through renewal of genres and notions, often in the context of intertextuality or parody, or through a straightforward confrontation of the nature of language.49 In the Third Book (chap. 19), a book of heroic sayings more than of heroic deeds, it is Pantagruel, after all, who insists on the fact that it is a “misstatement to say that we have a natural language: languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions of peoples; words as the dialecticians say, signify not by nature but by our pleasure” (cw 311). Such fundamental statements are a strong indicator that the control over meaning—or the lack thereof—seems to be Rabelais’s overarching concern, and this issue becomes more explicit and more complex in the Third and Fourth Books, from the pro-

48

49

Panurge and his evolving role in the course of the chronicles is possibly the chief illustration of this central phenomenon; see Renner, “From Fearsome to Fearful: Panurge’s Satirical Waning,” in Fear and its Representations in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. Anne Scott and Cynthia Kosso (asmar) 6 (Turnhout: 2002), 206–237, and Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, “Hors toute intimidation”: Panurge ou la parole singulière (er) 41 (Geneva: 2003). For the aspect of intertextuality in this context, see Menini, Rabelais altérateur, especially the epilogue, 959–1025; Le Cadet, “Beuveurs tresillustres,” 269–276. For the subtle complexity of the rhetorical “game,” see for example George Hoffmann, “Neither one nor the other and both together,”er 25 (1991): 79–90, Emmanuel Naya, “‘Ne scepticque ne dogmatique, et tous les deux ensemble’: Rabelais ‘On Phronistere et escholle des pyrrhoniens’,”er 35 (1998): 81–129, Renner, “Provocation et perplexité: Le double éloge paradoxal des dettes et de la rhétorique,”er 50 (2010): 45–65, and id., “ ‘Qu’un fol enseigne bien un saige’: Folie et ironie dans le Tiers livre de Pantagruel,” ar 1 (2017): 161–181. For the nature of language, see also Huchon, “Rabelais et le vulgaire illustre,” in La langue de Rabelais—La langue de Montaigne, 19–39. For the important concept of “parody,” see most recently Richard Cooper, “Rabelais et la parodie littéraire,” ar 1 (2017): 101–119.

21

why read rabelais now?

longed series of consultations in the 1546 text, ostensibly devoted to Panurge’s personal marriage dilemma, to the largely verbal encounters of the Fourth Book that culminate in the episodes of the puzzling Frozen Words and of the highly ambiguous Messere Gaster (ql 55–56; 57–62). Drawing on Rabelais’s main sources, inspirations, and concerns, the twentyone chapters of this Companion reflect the extraordinary vitality and complexity of current Rabelais scholarship, far exceeding the scope of these introductory remarks. They answer the question that gave this introduction its title, an answer that could be summarized as follows: Rabelais witnessed and commented critically on an era not unlike our own, an era of extraordinary upheaval, of accelerating circulation of information, and of increasingly critical attitudes toward conventional wisdom, received truths, and authority. The questions he asks, the problems he points out, and, more importantly, the way in which he does it—a tolerant and lively exchange of informed opinions and differing viewpoints marked by the entire spectrum of attitudes, from laughter to indignation—, have not aged a bit. His books are a blueprint of how to deal with such issues and still have a considerable impact on our thinking, whether or not one has a particular interest in early modernity. The Rabelaisian œuvre is a timeless classic that promises to enrich future generations just as it did past generations for almost five centuries. His wisdom and his comedy need to be savored and digested, an objective that this Companion will help to achieve. This is, in a nutshell, why we should read Rabelais nowadays. Therefore, to close with the inspirational “panomphaean word” of the Divine Bottle of the Fifth Book addressed to all readers: Trinch!

∵ The editions of reference, unless noted otherwise in individual chapters, are François Rabelais, Œuvres complètes, ed. M. Huchon with the collaboration of F. Moreau (Paris: 1994), for the French text (oc or the common abbreviations for the individual books), and The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: 1991) for the English version (cw).50 As mentioned before, the more recent and more easily accessible Penguin paperback translation of M.A. Screech, Gargantua and Pantagruel (London: 2006), presents the decisive disadvantage of using the respective first editions of Pantagruel (probably 1532) and Gargantua (probably 1535) with

50

Rabelais’s individual texts are abbreviated in the usual manner: P, G, tl, ql, cl for the five major books, bd for the Briefve declaration, pp for the Pantagrueline Prognostication.

22

renner

selected variants from later editions instead of the definitive editions from 1542 that are at the basis of our French edition of reference and of most other available editions.

∵ Among the many colleagues and friends who contributed to the publication of this volume, I would like to thank in particular Arjan van Dijk from Brill Publishers, who had the initial idea for this volume, Ivo Romein from Brill who oversaw the production process, the editor of the rsa Text and Studies Series at the time, Craig Kallendorf, who accepted the proposal, his successor Ingrid A.R. De Smet, who provided precious and above all patient guidance, and David Marsh, the current editor, as well as Carla Zecher from The Renaissance Society of America. The contributors to this volume deserve a special mention for their excellent work and patience. My colleagues at the City University of New York accompanied the writing and editing process with interest and support. Special thanks are due to Marian Rothstein, who translated several contributions to this volume, and to our cuny doctoral candidate Elizaveta Lyulekina, who formatted the notes of the chapters and compiled the bibliography and the index. Many more names could be mentioned, but I would like to close these remarks by acknowledging the unwavering support of my family, who made this all possible.

part 1 Life and Context

∵

chapter 1

Rabelais in His Time Mireille Huchon

At present only a fragmentary image of Rabelais’s life can be reconstructed. Until now some parts of it have often been inappropriately interpreted, leading to long-lasting misrepresentations. The many unknowns in a turbulent life invite hypotheses, later to be confirmed or undermined by the discovery of new documentation. In the 21st century scholars have unearthed petitions addressed to the pope, editions for which Rabelais was responsible, and books he owned whose pages bear invaluable manuscript marks. All these open new perspectives on the man and his work, while at the same time inviting many new questions. Rabelais’s birthdate can only be placed within a twenty-year range. A variety of dates have been suggested without any single one being entirely convincing. Until the 20th century, the most generally accepted date of birth, 1483, came from Louis Moreri’s 1681 claim in the second edition of his Grand dictionnaire historique, stating that Rabelais died in 1553 at the age of 70, information repeated in an addition to an 18th-century book of epitaphs found in the Church of Saint Paul in Paris. But the term adolescens that Rabelais uses to describe himself in the letter he wrote on 4 March 1521 to Guillaume Budé, and the praise expressed by his friend André Tiraqueau in 1524 for his mastery of ancient languages well beyond what might be expected for a man of his age, do not readily apply to a man in his forties. The date 1494, suggested at the start of the 20th century and uncritically repeated afterward, emerges from a biographical reading of his ‘Giant fictions,’ an erudite obfuscation on the part of Abel Lefranc, the learned editor of Rabelais. Exasperatingly, the question remains open. It is not impossible that Rabelais was born at the very start of the 16th century. Since the end of the 17th century, the Devinière, a rural house in Seuilly, near Chinon, has traditionally been considered the place of his birth, although his father, far from being the innkeeper of tradition, was a well-known lawyer, counselor, and royal solicitor in Chinon, who also owned many properties in the region in addition to that farmhouse. In fact, until Rabelais became known to the world of letters by means of the correspondence that he exchanged with Budé starting in 1520, nothing certain is known of his life. A tradition that can be traced to the 17th century makes him a novice in the Franciscan convent of La Baumette near Angers, where

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_003

26

huchon

he could have met Guillaume (1491–1543) and Jean (1498–1560) Du Bellay, who were to be his patrons. However, there is no document to confirm this, leaving the intriguing and important question unanswered: just when did the brothers who figured so prominently in his career enter his life? Whatever the case, Rabelais was born during the reign of Louis xii, and lived under François ier (1515–1547) and the start of the reign of Henri ii (1547–1553). His work contains recollections of many historical events, the Du Bellay brothers having been directly involved in major affairs of the kingdom in the multiple conflicts between the king of France and the Emperor Charles v, with the king of England, Henry viii, and with a series of popes (Clément vii, Paul iii, Jules iii).

1

The 1520s: The Learned Monk

The first verifiable facts about the life of Rabelais concern his years in Poitou, starting in the Franciscan convent of Strict Observance in Puy-Saint-Martin at Fontenay-le-Comte in western Poitou, then in a Benedictine convent in Maillezais, near Fontaine-le-Comte, where he was protected by Geoffroy d’ Estissac. Contemporaries’ voices speak of a learned young Hellenist building strong friendships in various avant-garde intellectual circles in Poitou. Yet this leaves gaps. Where did Rabelais earn the degree of Master of Arts that he mentioned in a petition to the pope in 1549? Where did he learn the law, of which Budé noted his remarkable knowledge? Where did he acquire his exceptional competence in mathemata praised by the poet Salmon Macrin in 1537? Where did he begin his medical studies, enabling him to receive the degree of Bachelor of Medicine only a few weeks after matriculating at Montpellier’s medical school, whereas this degree required years of training? Did he live in Paris for some time, as is suggested by the multiple allusions to Parisian topography and city life in Pantagruel, published in 1532? Is this when a Parisian widow became the mother of his two children who asked the pope to legitimize them in 1540? 1.1 A Franciscan under the Patronage of Budé The collections of letters Budé published in 1522 and 1531 contain the recollection of his correspondence with two monks at Fontenay, Rabelais and Pierre Lamy (who had a degree in canon law), the two studious fellow-students praised by the humanist. The 1522 collection contains a letter to Rabelais written in April 1521, the response to Rabelais’s letter of 4 March 1521, the autograph manuscript of which has been preserved. In this letter Rabelais recalls his pre-

rabelais in his time

27

vious letter, written five months earlier, responding to Pierre Lamy’s friendly urging, against whom he says he wanted to bring a legal complaint de dolo malo (of evil intent) for having pushed him to be so bold as to write to Budé while he was himself but a humble person of no special repute. Budé in his response, speaking of his own love for the Muses and Philology, said he was charmed by Rabelais’s letter which suggested an exceptionally acute knowledge of Greek and Latin. The great Hellenist pointed out that Rabelais would be in error were he to bring any action against Pierre Lamy, as Rabelais, having studied law, ought to know. The correspondence continued for several years. In a letter of 25 February 1524, published in the 1531 collection, Budé invited Lamy to extend his greetings to Rabelais, here described as a learned man. In a letter addressed to Rabelais in January 1524, where he speaks of Lamy as Rabelais’s Pylades, he alludes to the confiscation of their Greek books by the superior of their convent and to his joy at learning that they had been returned. The confiscation was caused by a decision of the Paris faculty of theology reacting to the publication of Erasmus’s commentary on the Greek text of the Gospel of Luke in 1523. Greek was not yet being taught in schools and there were still very few books published in Greek. A few copies of Greek books bearing Rabelais’s ex-libris have survived, among them the edition of Plato published by Aldus Manutius in 1513. Some of these acquisitions date from his days in Fontenay, for example the copy of the edition of the works of Dennis the Areopagite published in Florence in 1516, bearing an ex-libris dated 1521, and two holograph lines referring to Pico della Mirandola. Rabelais was to acquire some other Greek works in the course of his life, for example the heavily annotated edition of Plutarch’s Moralia published in Basle in 1542. Alongside printed books he also acquired manuscripts: he had access to a manuscript of Hippocrates which served as the basis of his scholarly edition of 1532. In Fontenay-le-Comte, a well-known intellectual center where Louis xi had established a royal tribunal, Rabelais was part of the circle of the jurist André Tiraqueau who was the author of two 1513 works on marriage: a reedition of Francesco Barbaro’s De re uxoria; and his own De legibus connubialibus, which defended the husband’s role as guardian. In 1522, another friend of Rabelais’s, Amaury Bouchard, responded with a Latin apology for the female sex, with a Greek title and an introductory epistle written by Pierre Lamy addressed to Tiraqueau, mentioning Rabelais, the most learned of the Franciscans. This querelle des femmes was to have amusing echoes in the Third Book. In 1524, a new, much enlarged edition of De legibus connubialibus includes Rabelais’s first printed text (three Greek couplets presenting Tiraqueau as the equal of Plato);

28

huchon

Lamy praises Rabelais here as learned, and Tiraqueau, mentioning his elegant translation of Herodotus’s Book i—a translation that has not survived— praises his erudition in Greek, in Latin, and in all learning, so rare among Franciscans. Alongside Greek and law, metaphysics and mathematics were subjects of interest for this learned circle, strongly influenced by Lefèvre d’ Étaples, a major figure of early French humanism, translator of the Bible into Latin and French, helping to spread knowledge of Ficino’s Neoplatonism and of Kabbala as developed by Pico della Miradola. Pythagorism and Platonism were closely related, as the title of Amaury Bouchard’s 1532 work attests: Treatise on the excellence and the immortality of the soul, taken not only from Plato’s Timeus but also several other Greek and Latin philosophers, from both the Pythagorean and Platonic families [Traité de l’excellence et immortalité de l’ ame, extrait non seulement du Timee de Platon, mais aussi de plusieurs aultres grecz et latins philosophes, tant de la pythagorique que platonique famille]. Rabelais’s philosophical and religious thought owes much to these convent years spent with Pierre Lamy under the patronage of Lefèvre d’Étaples. His Third Book and the manuscript of the Fifth Book contain a warm remembrance of Lamy. 1.2 The Benedictine “Expert in All Learning,” His Patron, and His Circle After the confiscation of their Greek books, the two friends requested a change of order. We have the petition Lamy submitted to the Holy Apostolic Penitentiary in Rome in March 1524. It authorizes Lamy to move to the Benedictine Convent of Saint-Mesmin near Orléans where François Desmoulins de Rochefort was abbot. He would die in Basle soon afterward. It must have been by some analogous procedure that in 1524 Rabelais came to be a monk at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Pierre-de-Maillezais in Poitou, in the Poitevin marshes, about a dozen kilometers from Fontenay-le-Comte. He found a patron in the bishop of Maillezais, Geoffroy d’ Estissac, a worldly prelate who was a humanist and lover of arts and letters. Among other benefices, he had the revenues of Ligugé, a monastery founded in the 4th century by Saint Martin. Rabelais served as his secretary. He dedicated to d’ Estissac the 1532 edition of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates and Galen’s Art of Medicine, published in Lyon by Gryphe. During his second stay in Rome in 1535, he engaged in an informal correspondence with him, of which three letters written by Rabelais have been preserved; these were published in 1651. However, after 1535, there is no further sign of contact between the two: Rabelais had found another patron. In his collection of Moral and Familiar Letters [Epistres morales et familieres], the Poitevin lawyer, poet, and historiographer Jean Bouchet, also preserved an

rabelais in his time

29

instructive exchange of correspondence with Rabelais that took place in 1526. Rabelais is defined as a “man of great learning in Greek and Latin”; his letter to Bouchet, filled with many mythological references, the things one might imagine while waiting for a greatly desired thing, testifies to a side of Rabelais rarely seen and admired by his contemporaries: Rabelais the poet. In his letter to Rabelais, Bouchet, who speaks of him as a great friend, admires d’ Estissac as a wily politician, both worldly and learned, who liked men of letters able to discuss history and theology, and he praises Rabelais, expert in all learning, a competence which caused Estissac to notice him, take him into his service, and plan to grant him benefices—an excellent choice in Bouchet’s opinion. By reading the considerable correspondence between Jean Bouchet and the noble Abbot Antoine Ardillon (whom Rabelais would refer to in Pantagruel and the Third Book) it is possible to reconstruct the learned circle at Fontaine-leComte, the Augustinian abbey near Ligugé. It consisted of people connected to Parisian circles, especially to Lefèvre d’Étaples, for example the Carmelite Pierre de Lille. A passionate student of astronomical astrology, he had gone to Rome in 1516 to work on questions associated with the reform of the calendar and had retired to La Rochelle around 1518. In his last work, Tria calendaria, published in 1529, he mentions a translation of Lucian by Rabelais, a monk in Maillezais. Some of Rabelais’s characters bear a resemblance to people whom he knew during his time in Poitou. Epistemon recalls Politian’s Panepistemon, an encyclopedic overview of arts and sciences, well-received in France, and brought to the attention of the group at Fontaine-le-Comte by Nicolas Petit, lawyer and poet. Bouchet appears as Xenomanes, “the great traveler and traverser of dangerous paths” [“le grand voyagier et traverseur des voyes perilleuses”], an allusion to the alias Bouchet used as an author. Many qualities of frère Jean des Entommeurs recall frère Jean Thenaud, closely associated with Louise de Savoie, mother of François i. At the request of the king, who was interested in occult knowledge, he wrote cabalistic treatises, and works of Platonic and Hermetic speculation. His work on the great astrological conjunction of 1524 has many affinities with Rabelais’s, using Lucian, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, the creation of a giant (Gargalasua), elements of Kabbala, a theology shaped by the thought of Saint Paul, the use of fiction, a mixture of local traits and political events. Even in the absence of any documentation, it remains possible that Rabelais, as part of the university training of monks, was sent to Paris by his Benedictine monastery.

30

huchon

1.3 Difficult Times Extraordinary events that would later find an echo in Rabelais’s work marked a decade of increasing conflict between François i and Charles v who won election as emperor in 1519 over François i. Among other sources of discord between the two sovereigns were Burgundy and the territory around Milan. In 1525, following his defeat in Pavia, François i was taken prisoner and taken to Madrid. The January 1526 Treaty of Madrid of declared that he would cede Burgundy to Charles v and abandon all claims to Italian territories. His two sons were to serve as hostages. Once the king was freed, hostilities recommenced, marked in 1527 by the Sack of Rome by Charles v’s troops who took the pope prisoner. By the Treaty of Cambrai in 1529, François i was forced to relinquish his Italian claims and to pay an enormous ransom. As a Gentleman of the King’s Chamber, Guillaume Du Bellay was intimately involved in all these events. He too was taken prisoner at Pavia, but soon freed upon payment of a ransom. He was in charge of negotiations in Italy and made several trips to Madrid to confer with the captive king. He was present when the king was freed, present as well at the Sack of Rome, where he regretted the pope’s passive stance. By the following decade, the Du Bellays would have a primary role in the connections between France and Lutheranism which spread rapidly in Europe during the 1520s. The Augustinian monk Luther (1483–1546) had posted 95 theses against indulgences on the doors of the Wittenberg castle in October 1517. In June 1520, many of these propositions were condemned by the papal bull Exsurge Domine which Luther threw into the flames along with the Decretals. Following the publication of works clarifying his beliefs, he was excommunicated in January 1521, and, having appeared before the Diet of Worms, was proscribed in the Empire. But still, Lutheran ideas spread rapidly in Europe. In April 1521, the Sorbonne (one of the colleges of the faculty of theology) condemned 104 of Luther’s propositions and the Parlement began to censure books again. This was followed in 1523 by the condemnation of the Evangelical propositions of the Meaux Group formed around Guillaume Briçonnet, the spiritual director of Marguerite de Navarre. The group disbanded in 1525. Louis de Berquin, translator of Luther and Erasmus into French, was burned in 1529. Lutheranism spread especially quickly in German-speaking lands. In 1526, the Diet of Spire allowed German princes to authorize the religion of their choice in their territories. The turnabout of Charles v at the second Diet of Spire in 1529 caused German princes and the representatives of some cities to protest, whence the name “protestants.”

rabelais in his time

2

31

1530–1534: The Physician and His Early Literary Productions

At the start of the 1530s major changes occurred in the life and the status of Rabelais although their precise nature and consequences remain unknown. We know he put aside his Benedictine robes for secular clothing from the fact that he mentions it in later petitions to the pope, but we do not know exactly when he did this. His career as a doctor began in the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyon. He participated in Gryphe’s printing house, actively producing learned works in Latin concerning both medicine and law. At the same time, under a pseudonym, he published his satirical works in French, Pantagruel and the Pantagrueline prognostication. In 1534, Rabelais was bedazzled by his first visit to Rome with Jean Du Bellay, who had been assigned a delicate diplomatic mission to the pope: to plead in favor of Henry viii’s divorce. 2.1 The Du Bellay Brothers and Relations with England and Germany During these years, the Du Bellay brothers were at the forefront of political events that Rabelais would recount in his first books. Guillaume’s mission was to negotiate the application of the Treaty of Cambrai with the king of England: the liberation of François i’s children was paid for by a ransom part of which was to redeem a famous reliquary given as a pledge to the English king. Du Bellay brought this precious object back in 1530. The Du Bellay brothers were also directly implicated in the support Henry viii expected from the king of France as he sought the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The legitimacy of the papal dispensation whereby in 1502 Henry viii had been authorized to marry his brother’s widow was put in question. Guillaume Du Bellay, like his brother Jean (ambassador to London from 1527 to 1530), promised to help with the consultations to be conducted at universities in England, France, and Italy. In July 1530, after various shifts, the Sorbonne decided that this dispensation had been illegitimate. In January 1533 Henry concluded his union with Anne Boleyn and in May he repudiated Catherine of Aragon. Jean Du Bellay, who had been named bishop of Paris in 1532, was sent to Rome in February 1534 to convince Clement vii to suspend the effects of the excommunication he had issued in July 1533. The attempt failed. Henry viii was to be definitively excommunicated in 1538. The 1530s mark the birth of Anglicanism, as of Calvinism (Calvin converted to the Reform in 1533, published his Christianae Religionis Institutio in Geneva in 1536, followed by a French translation in 1541). Guillaume Du Bellay was also important in diplomatic relations with Germany in 1531–1536. In 1531, the Protestant states formed the League of Smalkald against Charles v. François i was to become their ally; Guillaume Du Bellay was

32

huchon

sent to confer with the German princes, remaining in contact with the Protestant theologians Martin Bucer and Philip Melanchthon, creating a network of informants starting with German students such as Jean Sturm and Jean Sleidan. Jean Du Bellay played an important role in the policy of rapprochement with the German princes. At the end of the decade, he had a remarkable network of German informants. From 1536 on, Guillaume Du Bellay was almost entirely occupied by events in the Piedmont which had come under French influence in the course of the third war between Charles v and François i. 2.2 The Physician, a Learned Editor Montpellier and Lyon became the “seat of his studies,” to evoke an expression used by Rabelais. He appears on the register of students of the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier on 17 September 1530. On 1 December he received his baccalaureate in medicine, which suggests that he had earlier studied medicine elsewhere. The Faculty of Medicine in Paris, for example, required four years of study for this degree. From 17 April to 24 June 1531, he taught a course as an intern, explaining the Aphorisms of Hippocrates and Galen’s Ars parva based on Greek texts. On 1 November 1532 he was appointed physician of the HôtelDieu of Lyon, a post he would hold until February 1535 (except for the period January–August 1534, during which he was in Rome with Jean Du Bellay). In a letter to Erasmus dated 30 November 1532, Rabelais expresses his admiration for a man whom he considers as a father, or better, as a mother who nourished him with divine knowledge at his very pure breast. He alludes to his connections to Bishop Georges d’Armagnac, protected by Marguerite de Navarre, and to exchanges of learned works. In the course of that year, 1532, Rabelais published the first of his learned works with the Lyonnais printer Sebastian Gryphe, whose workshop was a gathering place for intellectuals. In June, Rabelais published the second volume of the Ferrarese physician Manardo’s Epistolarum medicinalium, with a dedicatory letter to André Tiraqueau. August saw the appearance of his Hippocratis ac Galeni libri aliquot, ex recognitione Francisci Rabelaesi, reproducing an edition of several works of Hippocrates and Galen published in 1524, along with Rabelais’s marginal notes and the transcription of a Greek manuscript of the Aphorisms. At the end of the year, he published the Cuspidii testamentum, a Roman will, followed by a sales contract claiming to date from the Roman Republic, with a dedication to Amaury Bouchard dated 4 September. These were in fact forgeries produced by Italian humanists, and we are left to wonder if Rabelais was tricked or trickster. Gryphe would remain Rabelais’s exclusive publisher except for his fictional works and his almanacs. In 1534, Rabelais turned to him to print his edition

rabelais in his time

33

of Marliano’s Topographia antiquae Romae and in 1549 he returned with his Sciomachie and Celebrations in Rome at the Palace of My Lord the most Reverend Cardinal Du Bellay in Honor of the Happy Birth of My Lord of Orleans [Sciomachie, et festins faits a Rome au Palais de mon seigneur reverendissime Cardinal du Bellay, pour l’heureuse naissance de mon seigneur d’Orleans]. The same publisher produced the physician’s version of Camerarius’s edition of the works of Macrobius in 1538, followed in 1541 by Thorer’s edition of Apicius, and by a collection, Antiquitatum variarum autores, in 1552 The list of humanist editions he sent to Gryphe continued to grow: Politian, a Greek alphabet, etc. 2.3 Pantagruel and Current Events At the same time as he was engaged in scholarly publishing, Rabelais made his first contribution to French literature with the publication of Pantagruel: The Frightful and Shocking Deeds and Exploits of the Very Famous Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua. Recently Composed by Master Alcofrybas Nasier [Pantagruel: Les horribles et espouventables faictz et prouesses du tresrenomez Pantagruel Roy des Dipsodes, filz du grand geant Gargantua/ Composez nouvellement par maistre Alcofrybas Nasier], issued by the Lyonnais presses of Claude Nourry.1 “Alcofrybas Nasier,” an anagram of Françoys Rabelais, appears only in editions prior to 1534. After this time, he turns to “M. Alcofribas, Abstractor of Quintessence.” The authorship of editions of Gargantua is attributed to the “Abstractor of Quintessence,” and in 1542, both works are credited to “the late M. Alcofribas abstractor of Quintessence.” After the publication of the Third Book in 1546, Rabelais admits his paternity and Pantagruel becomes the second book of the series. Claude Nourry, known as ‘the Prince,’ was the publisher of authors close to Rabelais, such as Marot, and of Lefèvre d’Étaples’s New Testament. He had been in contact with Evangelical circles and the intellectual avant-garde since the arrival of his son-in-law, Pierre de Vingle. The latter was to emigrate to Switzerland in 1533, where he published works of Reformed propaganda and Olivetan’s famous French bible translated from Hebrew and Greek. A pamphlet directed against the abuses of the clergy, The Merchants’ Book [Le livre des marchans] which de Vingle published in 1533, refers to Pantagruel on its title page. The

1 The English translation by Donald Frame uses a title found in later editions (see below): “Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes, Restored to his Natural State with his Frightful Deeds and Exploits. Composed by the Late Master Alcofribas, Abstractor of Quintessence.” The Complete Works of François Rabelais (Berkeley, CA: 1991), 131.

34

huchon

author of this pamphlet was Antoine Marcourt, a pastor in Neuchâtel, who was to compose the placards against the mass in 1534. Because Nourry’s edition is not dated, we are left with the question whether it appeared in 1531 or 1532. The seven editions (real or counterfeit) published before 1534 speak of the success of the work. François Juste published it in 1533, 1534 (with many changes), 1537, and 1542 (the text on which modern editions are usually based). The successor of Claude Nourry, Pierre de Sainte Lucie, printed it in 1535; Denis de Harsy in 1537, and Etienne Dolet in 1542. From 1537 on, publishers produced it with an accompanying edition of Gargantua. The work may have caused a scandal when it first appeared. The poet Nicolas Bourbon, in an epigram in his Nugae (1533), “In Rabellum,” attacks the author for his obscure clowning, which was likely to turn schoolchildren away from a love of literature. In October 1533, a letter written by Jean Calvin reports the words of a member of the Sorbonne, the curate of Saint André des Arts, having said that he had placed Pantagruel on a list of pernicious books on grounds of obscenity, but at that date, it had not yet been condemned by the Sorbonne. The most violent attacks against the Sorbonne were removed from Pantagruel in 1542. They reflected the struggle of those close to the king—Marguerite de Navarre and the Du Bellay brothers—with the Sorbonne; ten years later, these had lost their currency. Reflecting the influence of Erasmus and his critique of church abuses, Rabelais’s Evangelism is aggressive in his first two books. Later, he was to be less direct. Pantagruel is the name of a little devil appearing in Mystery plays, having the power to inspire thirst. Rabelais invented his birth, his Parisian youth, his encounter with Panurge, his war against the Dipsodes (Greek for “thirsty people”). Panurge became the son of the giant Gargantua, hero of a work that had appeared slightly earlier, Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Great and Huge Giant Gargantua [Grandes et inestimables Cronicques: du grant et enorme geant Gargantua], of which, if we are to believe the prologue of Pantagruel, more copies were sold in two months than of the bible in nine years. Rabelais could have had a hand in these anonymous chronicles (the table of contents points to episodes he would build on in his own Gargantua); they should be thought of rather as a collection of legends concerning a Celtic god, a clever scholar’s play on how to write history with a burlesque transposition of recent events such as Britany’s becoming part of France, and a satire directed against Henry viii of England. The name, Gargantua, recalls Mount Gargano, site of the first appearance of Saint Michael. In the Grandes Croniques, Gargantua is the founder of Mont Saint Michel, an important site in the imaginary of the French monarchy. The Grandes Croniques present an ironic revision of Alain Bouchard’s 1514

rabelais and religion

85

tage over Francis i.69 The Pantagrueline Prognostication parodies the illegitimate and superstitious claims of what at the time was called judicial astrology to foretell the future;70 it did not confine itself to predicting the weather and the harvests, but ruled on individual destinies and the fate of empires. Rabelais’s text, a mixture of truisms, flights of fancy, and a survey of trades classed by planetary influence (recasting along the way some of the invective against the bigots),71 reaffirms the preeminence of Providence,72 while the stars’ influence on individuals and empires is reduced to empty stereotypes. The Almanachs likewise undermine the authority of judicial astrology, but in a more serious way.73 The two works are clearly complementary and take up contemporary debates between opponents and proponents of astral divination (without going as far as judicial astrology). Rabelais, the “astrologer physician,”74 seems to have been a proponent: the contents of Pantagruel’s studies, outlined in Gargantua’s letter, suggest this,75 and Rabelais’s enthusiasm for Christian astrology seems to increase from Pantagruel to the Tiers Livre. These texts, which shed light on Rabelais’s position on the issue of freedom—a crucial question for the Reform and evangelism—can thus be read as paving the way for the questions raised in the Tiers Livre. In this later work (1546), the question of freedom re-emerges from two elements: divination and Panurge’s “paradoxes.” In his dread of being cuckolded, Panurge has recourse to divination, despite the fact that by definition marital fidelity cannot be predicted, because marriage is a bond between two free wills.76 In these episodes—which have been read as bearing the traces of Calvin’s attacks on divination,77 but also as reaffirming human freedom and the need to act—Panurge encounters the illusory nature of actions designed to force Providence to disclose its secrets (for example, divination by dice, a 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

See Screech, Rabelais, 145. See Céard, La Nature et les prodiges: L’insolite au xvie siècle en France (Geneva: 1977), 149– 150. Pantagrueline Prognostication, ch. 5, 928–929. Pantagrueline Prognostication, ch. 1, 925. On the unity of this corpus, see Le Cadet, “Les rééditions de la Pantagrueline Prognostication et le tissage énonciatif chez Rabelais,” er 46 (2008): 115–136. Jean Dupèbe, “Rabelais, médecin astrologue du Pantagruel au Tiers Livre,” in Actes du Colloque international de Rome. Mars 1996, ed. Franco Giacone. (er) 37 (Geneva: 1999), 71–97. Dupèbe, “Rabelais, médecin astrologue du Pantagruel au Tiers Livre,” 85–86; cf. Pantagruel, ch. 8, 244. See Céard, La Nature et les prodiges, 132–134. Emily Butterworth, “Scandal in Rabelais’s Tiers Livre: Divination, Interpretation, and Edification,” Renaissance and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réforme 34.4 (2011): 23–43.

86

pouey-mounou

“sort […] abusif, illicite, et grandement scandaleux”, in Pantagruel’s words78); then, after a series of divinatory consultations, he is obliged by his interlocutors to make decisions himself, and assume them, despite his fears, since his second series of consultations are for counsel only (“de conseil” and not “de fait”);79 and lastly there is the new departure of consulting the madman Triboulet, which makes him resolve to embark on his quest for the oracle of the Dive Bouteille. These episodes thus pose the problem of will and action and also of a freedom still in its infancy. Panurge’s provocations are an expression of this freedom, but despite his vis comica, and his impertinence, he is a more anxious figure in the Tiers Livre than previously. His spectacularly wayward words and deeds cohabit with his apparent preoccupation with the formalist and ecclesiastical tradition: he defends—in such a way as to discredit—the extravagant expenditure of prelates,80 monastic formalism, and the lasciviousness of monks (whose habits, he claims, have aphrodisiac properties),81 and he champions the respect due to Ichthyophages (fish-eaters);82 he also exposes the greed and parasitical character of mendicant orders, and particularly the extortion of testamentary endowments during the performance of last rites, recalling Erasmus’s Colloquy Funus.83 His “paradoxes” echo contemporary criticisms of the Church’s corruption: the wealth of the upper echelons of the clergy, their profligate lifestyle, the profits made by selling indulgences, the unequal, formalist and hypocritical practices of fasting—the object of intense discussion due to the Protestant refusal to fast during Lent84—, the pursuit of basely material gain masquerading as a discourse on the virtues (in the eulogy of debt), the regular clergy’s “tyranny,” and its distinguishing features such as the habit and celibacy (since Panurge paradoxically dons his monk’s attire to show that he wishes to marry).85 All these issues of food and clothing were central to the contemporary 78

79

80 81 82 83 84 85

tl 11, 383. cw 288: “that kind of divination […] deceitful, illicit, and extremely scandalous.” On the question of the divinatory quest in the Tiers Livre, and the stakes involved, see Céard, La Nature et les prodiges, 132–158. See Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois: Paradoxe, scandale et propriété dans le Tiers Livre, (er) 53 (Geneva: 2013), 150, on the distinction between questions “of fact” (“de fait”) and “of counsel” (“de conseil”), tl, ch. 12–25, 29–36. tl 2, 358. tl 7, 373, and 27, 437. tl 22, 418. From the title of one of Erasmus’s colloquies, Colloques, ed. and trans. E. Wolff (Paris: 1992), 2 vols, t. 2, 73–139. tl 21–22, 417–418. See Erasmus, Colloques, t. 2, 140–161; and Véronique Zaercher, Le dialogue rabelaisien: Le Tiers Livre exemplaire, (er) 38 (Geneva: 2000), 262–266. tl 2, 358–360. See Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois, 117–124. tl 7, 372.

rabelais and religion

87

debate on “indifferent” things (adiaphora), that is, things which in themselves are neither good nor bad, a category which the Reformers and evangelicals chose to expand significantly, to include even celibacy in the Church.86 These issues arise because Panurge’s dilemma is caught up in contemporary debates on marriage versus celibacy. There is arguably a humanist valorization of marriage in Rabelais’s work.87 Panurge’s decision to show his desire for marriage through his monk’s attire, which is in fact supposed to advertise quite the opposite, not only satirizes the clergy’s failures regarding the vow of chastity, but also suggests a collapse of the opposition through an erosion of the clergy’s distinctive celibacy. In the course of his consultations, and particularly in his dialogue with the theologian Hippothadée, he encounters the view that it is better to marry than to burn (“Car trop meilleur est soy marier, que ardre on feu de concupiscence”).88 This maxim from St. Paul, that one should marry if one is unable to contain one’s passions, was harnessed to the contemporary criticism of celibacy in the Church. Hippothadée anyway recommends that Panurge weigh up freely what is best for him (“Mon amy vous nous demandez conseil, mais premier fault que vous mesmes vous conseillez”).89 Such a formulation may appear to have a Protestant ring to it, but the advice he also gives on how to avoid being cuckolded, namely to choose a God-fearing wife and to be a model for her, suggests a conception of ‘good works’ as active virtues and as putting faith into practice, which is Catholic without being formalist, and also leaves room for divine grace.90 However, Panurge’s and the Pantagruelists’ dialogue is not simply an attack on the instituted Church, since the use of paradox itself raises the issue, much debated at the time, of the freedom to shock, a freedom claimed by the Reformers against the Church. The notion of “paradox” appeared in Lutheran controversies, and was criticized by Erasmus in the debate on free will (and other, more specific, questions like fasting), as harmful to the ideal of concord and

86 87

88 89 90

Screech, Rabelais et le mariage: Religion, morale et philosophie du rire (1958), trans. A. Bridge (Geneva: 1992), ch. 7, 137–148. Screech, Rabelais et le mariage, 17–34, and his critique of Émile V. Telle, “Thélème et le paulinisme matrimonial érasmien: Le sens de l’ énigme en prophétie (Gargantua, chap. lviii),” in François Rabelais. Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort, 1553– 1953 (Geneva: 1953), 104–119; and Telle, “L’île des Alliances (Quart Livre, chap.ix) ou l’antiThélème,” bhr 14 (1952): 159–175. i Cor vii:9: “for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.” See Screech, Rabelais et le mariage, 90–94, 106–107. cw 349: “My friend, you ask advice of us, but first you must advise yourself.” And already Pantagruel in tl 10, 380. Screech, Rabelais et le mariage, 97–102.

88

pouey-mounou

charity.91 Calvin (who later wrote a treatise entitled On Scandals, 1550), was already querying the legitimacy of a freedom which causes friction, in his earlier Institutes of Christian Religion (1536), and elsewhere.92 Pantagruel’s attitude to Panurge in this respect reflects Erasmus’s position: he is indulgent towards Panurge’s exploratory quests, in conformity with St Paul’s exhortation “Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind,” a principle which endorsed the evangelicals’ exercise of choice in “indifferent” things,93 and he lets Panurge go to farcical extremes, but he is also anxious about the effects of this on the “crude populace” (“le rude populaire”), whose faith could waver.94 So Rabelais’s position is once again evangelical, close to that of Erasmus, who sought to harmonize the two major principles of charity and freedom. It is profoundly influenced by the theological debate on free will, through the problem of human will and action: Panurge is fully free to act, but he must make a personal choice and commit himself, since “No man is exempt from setting out to sea.”95 Panurge’s sophistic defense of debt is particularly interesting in this context because it plays on, and subverts, the topos of the virtues. It has been read with many different emphases: the self-consciousness of this rhetorical undoing of rhetoric;96 the relation to power implied by Panurge’s world, which is built on debt; the polysemy of the term, and its possible understanding as “sins” (debita), as in the Pater Noster prayer.97 But it can equally be read as a critique of the cardinal virtues as such, by Reformers who advocated grace over free will; and, in the context of anti-ecclesiastical critique, as a condemnation of the transformation of these virtues into a hypocritical caricature of their true value, a formalist morality of false “works.”98 Panurge’s dilemma has received the most critical attention. This smooth-talking, provocative, and anxious figure has been interpreted as a depiction of the sin of “philauty”99—self-love, which

91

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Erasmus, De libero arbitrio. See Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois, 124–136; Renner, “Provocation et perplexité: Le double éloge paradoxal des dettes et du langage (Tiers Livre, ii à v),” er 50 (2010): 45–65. Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois, 95–117. See Screech, Rabelais, 306. tl 7, 372; cw 278. See Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois, 70–79. Céard, La Nature et les prodiges, 158. Renner, “Provocation et perplexité”. Defaux, “De Pantagruel au Tiers Livre: Panurge et le pouvoir,” er 13 (1976): 163–180, reprinted in Rabelais agonistes, 327–346. Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois, 89–95. See Verdun-Louis Saulnier, Rabelais i. Rabelais dans son enquête: La sagesse de Gargantua, le dessein de Rabelais (Paris: 1983), vol. i, annexe iv, 212–216; Screech, Rabelais, ch. 6, 308– 312, and passim; Screech, “Folie érasmienne et folie rabelaisienne,” in Colloquia Erasmiana

rabelais and religion

89

is an obstacle to divine action—but equally as a free and singular voice with respect to the prejudices of doxa.100 He represents a number of positions—the hypocritical rigidity, or Pharisaism, of the established Church, a violent challenge to the established order, assimilable to Lutheran militancy, which is not necessarily any more legitimate, and the quest for personal freedom, which Pantagruel respects. Panurge thus clearly embodies a new complexity, which reflects that of his time. His character is an affirmation of the legitimacy of anti-ecclesiastical critique, of the freedom to pursue existential questions, as well as the concern for social cohesion. The denouement of the narrative is also the object of much discussion. For some critics, Judge Bridlegoose, who entrusts his verdicts “au sort des dez,” and the madman Triboulet, illustrate the narrative’s movement towards an Erasmian “God’s folly.”101 The fact that Bridlegoose, after assembling at great length the evidence for the trials he judges, finally decides the cases by a throw of the dice, demonstrates, in this light, the profound trust in Providence of the “simples et humbles,”102 with secondarily a satire on the tortuous slowness and incompetence of the justice system; and Triboulet is understood as embodying the Pauline distinction between the “two wisdoms” (of God and of humankind) and the transformation of human folly into the folly of God. We find this Pauline and Erasmian aspect spelt out in Pantagruel’s recommendation to Panurge to seek counsel from a madman: Car come celluy qui de prés regarde à ses affaires privez et domesticques, […] vous appellez Saige mondain, quoy que fat soit il en l’ estimation des Intelligences cœlestes: ainsi faut il pour davant icelles sage estre […], issir hors de soymesmes, vuider ses sens de toute terrienne affection, purger son esprit de toute humaine sollicitude, et mettre tout en non chaloir. Ce que vulguairement est imputé à follie.103

100 101 102 103

Turonensia, vol. i (Paris: 1972), 441–452. On Erasmian “philauty”, see Jean Mesnard, “Sur le terme et la notion de philautie,” in Mélanges sur la littérature de la Renaissance à la mémoire de V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1984), 197–214. Marrache-Gouraud, “Hors toute intimidation”: Panurge ou la parole singulière, (er) 41 (Geneva: 2003). cw 39: “by the chance of dice.” tl 39–46. See Screech, Rabelais, 345–363. tl 43, 487. tl 37, 468; cw 369: “For even as a man who keeps close watch on his private and domestic affairs, […] you call worldly wise, although he may be an idiot in the estimation of the celestial Intelligences; even so it is necessary, in order to be wise in their eyes […], empty his senses of all earthly affection, purge his spirit of all human solicitude, and look at every-

90

pouey-mounou

Other critics, however, highlight the blinkered literalism of Bridlegoose— whom it is indeed difficult to take as a positive model—and the farcical aspects of the consultation with Triboulet. In this light, it is only Time, that major protagonist of the narrative,104 which can partly resolve the dilemma, or at least reorient the goal of the quest so that Panurge can finally to set sail. Regarding these ‘serious’ readings of the Tiers Livre, which highlight the Augustinian and Erasmian threads in the text, or else the confrontation between two orders of representation, transcendent and immanent, in the dialogue between the characters and the unfolding of the plot, other critics stress the comic sophistry of Panurge’s words and their subversive power. After all, his indignation at Pantagruel’s predictions of cuckoldry are understandable,105 given that Pantagruel’s viewpoint is not supported by any more solid evidence than is his own, especially when the alternative, as advanced by Hippothadée, is resigning oneself to Providence.106 Other commentators are wary of overemphasizing the role of Pantagruel, in order not to assume that he is the mouthpiece of the author, and note the devaluation of Epistémon in the Tiers Livre, where he has become a figure of doxa,107 and of a static formalism, to the point of Pharisaism. However, the plot moves forward through the dialogue between the characters. Since this concerns contemporary approaches to human freedom, the problem of action acquires an extra layer of complexity. The issue of marriage emerges again at the end of the narrative, this time concerning Pantagruel, who defers to the wishes of his father in this matter. Their conversation may seem disconcerting for a modern reader because it condemns marriage without parental consent, but in fact Rabelais was adopting the position of the Catholic humanists in a contemporary legal-theological controversy: whereas normally, in conflicts between canon law and civil law at the time, it was canon law which prevailed, here the dialogue between father and son rejects clandestine marriages as “abuses” encouraged by profiteering and corrupting monks.108 Although Rabelais’s position—disparaging,

104 105 106 107 108

thing with unconcern, which is popularly imputed to folly.” These terms recall Erasmus’s Enchiridion at the end of his Praise of Folly. Céard, “Le jugement de Bridoye,” Cahiers Textuel 15 (1996): 49–62; Oumelbanine Zhiri, “Le Tiers Livre, le temps et le sens,” in Rabelais et la question du sens, 161–174. Tournon, “Dynamique de la déraison: La symétrie faussée du Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” Europe 757 (May 1992): 6–19 (7–9), and his “En sens agile,” 62–65. tl 30, 446–448. See, for example, Lance K. Donaldson-Evans, “Panurge Perplexus: Ambiguity and Relativity in the Tiers Livre,” er 15 (1980): 77–96. Zhiri, L’ Extase et ses paradoxes. Essai sur la structure narrative du Tiers Livre (Paris: 1999), 108–109. See also Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois, 349–351. tl 48, 496–500. See Screech, Rabelais, 365–370, and his Rabelais et le mariage, 57–71.

rabelais and religion

91

as always, of monasticism—is on a specific legal point here, it immediately signals his Gallicanism, which is given free rein in the Quart Livre. With the tale of the quest for the Dive Bouteille, the reader is taken on a sea voyage between islands representing the contemporary factions in Christianity. It is important to take into account the historical contexts of the two narratives— the Quart Livre and the Cinquiesme Livre—, and their different states. The first two editions of the Quart Livre (1548 and 1552) were published in the context of the Church’s reaction to Protestantism, and the Council of Trent’s decisions on Counter-Reformation dogma (1542–1563), but also in the context of the English Reformation (the break with Rome, 1534), the tensions between the monarchs of France (Francis i, then Henri ii), of England (Henry viii) and the Holy Roman Empire (Charles v), as well as the Gallican conflicts between the French monarchy and the Vatican. In the period between the two versions of the Quart Livre—the first of which ends on the storm—the Gallican crisis intensified due to two affairs, the situation of the Council of Trent within the Holy Roman Empire, and the election to the Duchy of Parma, coveted by France and the Holy Roman Empire.109 Rabelais’s “post-storm” landscape is generally read in the light of his support for the King’s and the parlement’s Gallicanism, as a biting satire on the contemporary conflicts, on fasting (discussed at the Council of Trent), and on the papal court. It has also been compared to the criticisms made by the Protestant jurist Charles Du Moulin of the pope’s mule, the Decretals, the idolatrous practices regarding the pope and his infallibility, the practice of simony and the annates (taxes collected by the pope on ecclesiastical posts).110 However, a moderate position has also been noted, a “third party” embodied by the Du Bellays (Rabelais’s protectors), who worked towards reconciliation both within and outside France, against the Catholic extremists (Rabelais’s detractors), particularly the Cardinal of Tournon.111 So it is possible that this island-hopping through the seas of contemporary polemic enacts some cancelling out of the antagonisms the islands represent, through the mediation of the Pantagruelists and particularly of Pantagruel, in a staging of this pol-

109

110 111

On these two affaires, see Marichal, “Quart Livre. Commentaires,” er 5 (1964): 101–103; Defaux, Rabelais agonistes, 455–515; Huchon, note on Quart Livre, oc, 1465–1466, and Rabelais, 47–48, 52–53. Cooper, “Rabelais, Jean Du Bellay et la crise gallicane,” in Rabelais pour le xxie siècle, ed. M. Simonin (er) 33 (Geneva: 1998), 299–325 (316–319). Dupèbe, “Un chancelier humaniste sous François ier, François Olivier,” in Humanism and Letters in the Age of François ier, eds. P. Ford and G. Jondorf (Cambridge, Eng.: 1996), 87–114; Cooper, “Rabelais, Jean Du Bellay et la crise gallicane,” 301.

92

pouey-mounou

icy of reconciliation. At all events, it would seem that Rabelais followed the deliberations of the Council closely. We find allusions to its occurrence in the first Quart Livre (1548) (the chapter on Lanternland and the “the Council of Chesil”),112 reinforced in the second Quart Livre (1552) by the mention of the meeting with the “concilipetes”—served by an etymological wordplay which suggests the unlikely success of their conciliatory role!113 The Quart Livre’s Prologue of 1552, with its farcical apology of Couillatris’s lost hatchet, and its lesson of “mediocrity,” clearly signals a moderate position within the denominational conflicts:114 Couillatris chooses his own hatchet from among the more precious ones presented to him by the gods, a move which also, once again, endorses the principles of human freedom and effort.115 This combination of moderation and satire, of displays of faith and polemical stances, characterizes the overall tone of the narrative. A good illustration of this is the rewriting of the episode of the storm. In the 1548 version, some of Epistémon’s statements on free will conflict with those of the Tridentine “Mateologiens,” who had recently promulgated their first decrees on justification and free will (1547), leaving little hope for reconciliation with the German Protestants.116 These statements disappear in the 1552 version, but the criticism of intercession and penitence, subjects which the Council of Trent also debated, becomes harsher. On the rewriting of the storm episode, Screech argues that Rabelais was influenced by Erasmus’s Naufragium colloquy in his 1552 emphasis on the collaboration, or synergy, between man and God.117 This is suggested, in Screech’s view, by the reworked dialogue of the Pantagruelists, which brings out the opposition between paralyzing fear and superstition, and action in this world: Panurge whimpers and calls on all the saints, obsessed with his testament and with confessing his sins rather than acting, while the monk Frère Jean does act, but swearing all the time, much to the horror of Panurge who worries about the (theoretical) blasphemy of such utterances. A third way is exemplified by Pantagruel in whom prayer and action work together (Pantagruel invokes God the Savior, and not only God the Redeemer, salvator). The message would thus be that man’s efforts can work together with grace, but neither in the sense of the Catholic theologians and

112 113 114 115 116 117

ql 5, 548, and 18, 581. ql 64, 690. See also ch. 35, 622. The name Chesil means madness (kessil in Hebrew). ql Prologue, 525–535. See Screech, Rabelais, 427–428, and L’ Évangélisme de Rabelais, 66–71. cw 39: “daydreaming theologians.” Cooper, “Rabelais, Jean Du Bellay et la crise gallicane,” 306–307. Screech, Rabelais, 440–451. See Erasme, Colloques, t. 1, 266–276.

rabelais and religion

93

their ‘works’ (ritualistic and especially penitential practices instead of active virtues) nor in the sense of Calvinist predestination. What makes this politico-theological alignment particularly difficult to interpret is that it is conciliatory but at the same time anti-Tridentine. It is close to the Du Bellay clan’s position, whose Gallicanism was much less strident than that of the parlement of Paris at the time, to the extent that it raised the suspicions of the court.118 So it is difficult to define a clear position for Pantagruel. As ever, he personifies someone who refers regularly to God, who respects the Scriptures, and who is pious towards the figure of Christ. This is illustrated just after this episode, when the group go ashore onto the island of the Macreons. The storm, analyzed as a sign of the death of a heroic soul, reminds Pantagruel, on the basis of Plutarch’s famous tale of the death of the “great Pan,” of the sacrifice of Christ,119 which moves him so deeply that he sheds tears “grosses comme œufz de Austruche”—in a narrative where signs of ‘gigantism’ are otherwise rare.120 Pantagruel also attempts to interpret the episode of the frozen words through the Holy Scriptures.121 In contrast to his impassive attitude in the Tiers Livre,122 he is more prone to indignation than in the preceding tales, but at times he is astonishingly neutral and even full of praise in the face of what are real scandals. Thus, he consecrates the pears given by Homenaz, the Bishop of Papimany, as “poires de bon Christian,” with possible ironic overtones.123 But the episode has also been interpreted as a diplomatic sign of neutrality in the Gallican crisis.124 It contrasts with the general attitude of the Pantagruelists and invites a satirical reading.125 The debates treated in the second Quart Livre focus on fasting during Lent, which was under discussion at the time at the Council of Trent. The theme is embodied in the conflict between Fastilent, the hypocritical Lord of the island of Coverup, and the people of Chitterlings. Fastilent is depicted as an AntiNature and a trouble-maker, on the basis of the dissection carried out on him, which ends on the etiological myth of Amodunt and Discord.126 But, as the Pan-

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

Cooper, “Rabelais, Jean Du Bellay et la crise gallicane,” 312–316. Plutarch, On the Failure of Oracles, and ql 28, 604–605. cw 498: “big as ostrich eggs.” Screech, Rabelais, 467–469. ql 55, 668–669. See Screech, Rabelais, 437. ql 54, 666; cw 554: “good-Christian pears.” See Screech, “Sagesse de Rabelais: Rabelais et les ‘bons christians’,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire, 9–15, and his Rabelais, 524–525. Cooper, “Rabelais, Jean Du Bellay et la crise gallicane,” 321–322. See Renner, “From Satura to Satyre,” 414–416. ql 32, 614–615.

94

pouey-mounou

tagruelists discover, the Andouilles also practice idolatrous meat-worship, in the form of their tutelary figure, Shrovetide, dispenser of mustard, their “Holy Grail.”127 A series of confusions between fish and fowl in the tale (encouraged by the play on sausages [andouilles], eels [anguilles] and snakes [serpents])128 suggests that the issue is less fasting as such than the alternating meat and non-meat days in the calendar, with all this implies in terms of formalism and dietary aberrations, which are the butt of satire. The ‘sausage war’ transposes these antagonisms. In the adherence to, or criticism of fasting, one can detect the contrasting approaches of the Roman Catholic Church and the various positions of the Reformers, as well as their different allies (the Andouilles’ troops as Lutherans,129 Swiss130 or English131). The central question of fasting reemerges with the stomach-worshippers—the Gastrolaters’ worship of Master Gaster according to meat and non-meat days132—and then again near Chaneph, the island of hypocritical and bigoted hermits, their “hermitesses” and “hermitkins.”133 They embody the regular clergy’s neglect of the vow of chastity, but also their killjoy attitude linked to fasting: simply breaking their fast would put an end to all the “fasch[erie]” (“feeling low”).134 The antagonisms become more complex in the second part of the Quart Livre, referring to further controversies, which target the power of the Roman Catholic Church. The discovery of the two opposed islands of the Popefigs (who do the fig sign to the pope) and the Papimaniacs (worshippers of the pope)— the first one ravaged by persecution and beset by devils, and the second monopolized by worship of the effigy of the pope and the Decretals135—illustrates both religious persecution and the neglect of God due to both the temporal and the spiritual authority vested in the pope by the Church. The persecutions probably refer to the massacre of the Vaudois at Mérindol and Cabrières in 1545, against the advice of the Du Bellays but supported by the Cardinal de Tournon,

127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

ql 42, 637. See Bowen, “Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages,” L’ esprit créateur 21.1 (1981): 12–25. Weinberg, “Layers of Emblematic Prose: Rabelais’ Andouilles,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 26.2 (1995): 367–377. Krailsheimer, “The Andouilles of the Quart Livre,” in François Rabelais. Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort, 226–232. Paul J. Smith, “ ‘Les âmes anglaises sont andouillettes’: Nouvelles perspectives sur l’épisode des Andouilles (Quart Livre, ch. 35–42),” in Rabelais et la question du sens, 99–111. ql 59–60, 676–681. ql 64, 690; cw 581. ql 64–65, 690–691 and 693; cw 582, 586. ql 45–47, 48–54.

rabelais and religion

95

which gave rise to a trial in 1551, in which the culprits were acquitted.136 The idolatrous Papimaniacs are lampooned for their political, legal, and financial aberrations based on their literal interpretation of the canonical expression quasi Deus in terra, and their treatment of the Head of the Church as their sole God on earth.137 The cult of the pope by Homenaz, who represents the Papimaniacs and is probably a caricature of Jules iii,138 is the pretext for an elaborate (paradoxical) eulogy of the Decretals and the way that, thanks to them, “est l’or subtilement tiré de France en Rome.”139 The Decretals, whose legitimacy was contested, were collections of papal rescripts promulgated on the pope’s personal authority, unlike decrees, that is, papal ordinances drawn up after consultation with cardinals, and canons.140 Their questionable legality is pointed up through the lapsus between “Decretist” and “Decretalist,”141 and their infamous financial implications, through the reduction of the “uranopètes Decretales,” supposed to guide mankind to heaven, to their “auriflue energie.”142 As for Master Gaster’s subjects, they are divided into two groups, the ventriloquating Engastrimyths and the Gastrolaters, the stomach-worshippers;143 they demonstrate how the word of God has been usurped by the clergy, and how its spiritual mission has succumbed to materialistic corruption. The climax of the critique of these aberrations, focused through the issue of food, involves a masquerade in which a gigantic jaw of Carnaval, Manduce, or Crunchcrust [Maschecroutte], is processed, and presides over an equally gigantic sacrificial banquet, which respects the alternation of meat and non-meat, despite being clearly idolatrous. Only Gaster seems to be aware of the illegitimacy of being worshipped in this way.144 Some commentators have suggested that the temporal power of the Roman Catholic clergy and its obsession with material goods satirized here are symptoms of a deeper aberration, the liturgical and formalist power wielded by the Church over issues of faith. From this perspective, the echoes in these chapters of Erasmian and Protestant attacks on “human traditions” and on “Pharisaism” can be interpreted as attacks on the cult of the Eucharist, in relation to Tri136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

See Frank-Rutger Hausmann, “Comment doit-on lire l’épisode de ‘l’isle des Papefigues’ (Quart Livre, 45–47)?,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire, 121–129 (127). ql 48, 649–650, n. 1, 649. See Marichal, “Quart Livre. Commentaires,” 106–118. See Marichal, “Quart Livre. Commentaires,” 129–132. ql, title of ch. 53, 662; cw 552: “gold is subtly drawn from France into Rome.” ql 51–53. See Screech, Rabelais, 520. Screech, Rabelais, 663, and n. 6. ql, title of ch. 49, 651, and ch. 53, 663; cw 552: “aurifluous energy.” ql 58, 674–675. ql 60, 681–682.

96

pouey-mounou

dentine debates on the sacraments (1547) and particularly on the Eucharist (1551–1552).145 Similarly, the complementarity of the Engastrimyths and the Gastrolaters would suggest a critique of ritualism, and advocacy of salvation through ‘good works’ understood as the practice of piety.146 In their focus on earthly nourishment and the idolatry of ‘sacrifice’ mediated through it, these episodes have also been read as challenging the central dogma of transubstantiation;147 other readings, however, note that in certain feasts (off the island of Chaneph, for example), Eucharistic rites are fully respected, which may be linked to their Erasmian conception as a real spiritualized presence.148 Thus the indictments relating to contemporary polemic would open onto a positioning within the broader field of Christian humanism. There is nothing self-evident about discussing the Cinquiesme Livre, compiled posthumously, after the Quart Livre, because the composition of its different chapters actually precedes the 1552 version of the Quart Livre. The case is further complicated by doubts as to the work’s authenticity, and the uncertainty surrounding its dates of composition and publication. We mention this work, however, after what should be regarded as the complete state of Rabelais’s oeuvre at his death, for the light it sheds on it. We generally accept today, following Mireille Huchon,149 that almost all of the text (except the chapter of the Apedeftes), is by Rabelais himself, and exists in three different states, but consists of assembled drafts which Rabelais had no intention of turning into a Cinquiesme Livre as such. Two groupings of drafts are particularly significant. The first one, which resembles a draft of the Quart Livre from between its two editions, or else preceding the first one, corresponds to the partial version published in 1562 under the title of L’Isle Sonnante. It includes a biting satire on the clergy in the episode of the Ringing Island (ch. ii–viii), an island where the bells ring constantly, and which is invaded by repulsive birds representing the different echelons of the Church, with their females and peculiar modes of reproduction, under the authority of the Popehawk and his Papesskites. The episode illustrates at once the violation of the vow of chastity and the power 145 146 147 148 149

Duval, “La messe, la cène et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” in Rabelais en son demimillénaire, 131–141. Duval, “La messe, la cène et le voyage,” 133–134. Duval, “La messe, la cène et le voyage,” 138. Smith, Voyage et écriture: Études sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (Geneva: 1987), 193–206. Huchon’s Notice to the Cinquiesme Livre, oc, 1595–612, and her Rabelais grammairien: De l’ histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité (Geneva: 1981), 435–489; Cooper, “L’authenticité du Cinquiesme Livre: État présent de la question,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone, (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 9–22. And see G. Milhe Poutingon’s contribution to the present volume.

rabelais and religion

97

struggles within the Church.150 In this ‘anti-world’ inhabited by the dregs of humanity (as Frère Jean had already complained at the founding of Thélème, concerning monks in their seclusion), the objects of satire include the creation of new orders, the chivalric orders, the vices often attributed to the clergy (greed, gluttony, laziness, and lust), the pillage of the Christian world by the papacy (in terms reminiscent of the praise of the Decretals in the Quart Livre), and the tyranny of the pope’s excommunications.151 This text has been regarded as echoing the ‘war of the bells’ which the Protestants waged through images against the Catholic Church at the time.152 The second set of drafts, which corresponds to a non-autographed manuscript found in the 19th century and to the long version of the Cinquiesme Livre, published in 1564, contains a Prologue which has been identified as a draft of that of the Tiers Livre,153 suggesting that it was written before the first set of drafts, and would have served either as a sketch for, or as a sequel to the Tiers Livre. The religious satire is concentrated in the episode of the island of the Clogs, where the Semiquaver Friars are the butt of anti-monastic satire. They have been interpreted as representing the Observant Franciscan Order which was flourishing in Brittany at the time (on the basis of the paronomasia Fredon / Breton), and also as yet another depiction of Roman Catholic Church.154 In their upside-down universe, the values and appearances of monastic life are inverted:155 they hum through their ears, feast in inverted order (“mustard after dinner”), and constitute a closed world whose hallmark is the corruption of charity (reduced to “se pelaud[er] l’un l’autre”—“scrapping with one another”) and a hypocritical obsession with sensual pleasures, to judge by the monosyllabic confidences which Panurge obtains from a Semiquaver Friar,156 in what is at once a parody of confession and a criticism of the privations of Lent.157 The mordant character of this material took on particular significance because of the context of its publication, much later than the date of its probable drafting, namely, for the L’Isle Sonnante, the first War of Religion, while the Cinquiesme Livre of 1564 was published at a time of (temporary) peace, but also 150 151 152

153 154 155 156 157

cl 2–4, 732–735. cl 2–8. See Frank Lestringant, “D’ un insulaire en terre ferme: Éléments pour une lecture topographique du Cinquiesme Livre, ou l’ autre monde de Rabelais,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome 81–101 (93). Huchon, Rabelais grammairien, 450–456. Huchon, “Archéologie du ve Livre,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire, 19–28. cl 26, 788–792. cl 27, 792–796. See P 14, 267; cw 182 for “se pelauder.” cl 28, 797–799.

98

pouey-mounou

at the close of the Council of Trent, in a climate of frustration for the French representatives, whose demands had not been met.158 This is why it has been mooted that L’Isle Sonnante was published by a Reformed author who wished to use these chapters for explicitly anti-clerical ends, whereas the positions of the 1564 work overall reflect the Tridentine debates, as was already the case for the Quart Livre. Discussing religion in Rabelais’s œuvre is no easy undertaking, for several reasons. It is a subject on which the interpretative positions are still hotly debated; secondly, whatever the line taken, the critic must contend with the text’s selfproclaimed hermeneutic slipperiness; and thirdly, there is an interweaving of purely polemical material (which is not always explicit, but often detectable, and sometimes plain for all to see) with the less immediately apparent philosophic-religious convictions which inform it. Criticism of the instituted Church is clearly central: against Scholastic theology, the monastic life, the Church’s formalism, fasting and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Rabelais’s Gallicanism also leaves no room for doubt, and the political and economic anchorage of all these issues is likewise beyond question. What needs to be stressed once more, however, is the coherence of Rabelais’s positions regarding values and issues of faith. Rabelais’s œuvre is saturated with scriptural sources, often in a playful way. But the most important influence is that of Erasmian evangelism. It sheds light on Rabelais’s anti-Scholastic Humanism, and on his interest in new ideas concerning the priesthood, penitence, and the Eucharist; it elucidates how his anti-ecclesiastical attacks can cohabit with the moderate line which emerges from the refusal to choose between two antagonistic positions, a stance which cost him dear, since he was attacked by both camps; and it explains his concern for social cohesion at the same time as an uncompromising attachment to human freedom. Analyzing religion in Rabelais’s œuvre can also reveal its status as a complex echo-chamber for contemporary controversies, beyond the author’s lifetime. But while the work is sensitive to the new intricacy of the interactions it stages, treating a vast range of issues in a more subtle way than may first appear, it also treads a personal path, developing an angle on the problem of action and freedom which is irreducible to any of the positions encountered. 158

Huchon’s Notice to the Cinquiesme Livre, oc, 1596.

chapter 4

Rabelais and Politics Michael Randall

Politics is everywhere in Rabelais’s novels, both in explicit references to real world events and ideas, and in the organization of the fictional world described in the books. Characters such as Gargantua and Pantagruel, the eponymous heroes of the books, as well as Gaster and Homenaz, two figures from the Quart Livre, provide abundant evidence of how politics was understood in the 16th century. While Rabelais did not write a political treatise on freedom, equality, and justice, nor a transparent roman à clef in which it is possible to identify fictional characters with real-world political people, the intersection of real-world politics and contemporary political theory in his books allows us a unique outlook on the French Renaissance polity. Since Rabelais’s novels often offer examples of well or badly organized cities, and of good and bad leaders, they have an effect similar to Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government (Allegoria del Buon Governo, 1338–1339) in Siena. While the artistic and comedic genius of its author provides esthetic pleasure, the literary texts themselves, like Lorenzetti’s frescoes, allow us to grasp what the well-ordered state in the French Renaissance was supposed to look like. They do this in a way that no purely historical description could.

1

Rabelais’s Experience of Politics

Rabelais’s writing reveals an understanding of politics that is grounded both in personal experience and theoretical knowledge. While his novels show that Rabelais was widely read in classical political thought, they also demonstrate a keen awareness of contemporary political issues. This awareness is especially notable in letters he wrote to his benefactor, Geoffroy d’ Estissac, from Rome, where he travelled three times in the 1530s.1 He made a first trip of two months in 1534, a second trip from August 1535 to April 1536, and a third one from September 1547 to September 1549. Even if Rabelais sometimes mixes up dates

1 Richard Cooper, Litteræ in tempore belli: Études sur les relations littéraires italo-françaises pendant les guerres d’ Italie (Geneva: 1997), 12.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_006

100

randall

and places in his reports of what’s happening in Rome, his letters demonstrate a first-hand knowledge of contemporary politics.2 In a letter from his second trip, dated 15 February 1536, for example, Rabelais filled in d’ Estissac on many of the comings and goings of the Roman political world. Among other things, he talks about how the Holy Roman Emperor Charles v had given a “baise main” to the Duke of Florence, how the emperor was short of money, and how Catherine of Aragon, the queen whom the English king Henry viii had repudiated, had died. This last fait divers inspires him to explain that the papal bull excommunicating Henry for his divorce from Catherine had been held up in the Consistory because of certain articles in it that had been opposed by the French Cardinal Jean Du Bellay and another representative of the French king.3 These letters to d’Estissac, which cover many different public and private matters, show that Rabelais had an insider’s access to, and keen interest in, the latest political events. Rabelais had accompanied Jean Du Bellay, who had recently been named cardinal by Pope Paul iii, to Rome as his personal doctor. Du Bellay played a crucial role in many political events of his day. In 1534, he had been sent by Francis i as his ambassador to the Holy See with the task of trying to prevent the English king Henry viii’s excommunication. A Dedicatory Epistle Rabelais had already written to Du Bellay in 1534 bears witness both to Du Bellay’s political clout and to Rabelais’s admiration for him. The letter, which accompanies Bartolomeo Marliani’s Topographia antiquae Romae, a work which Rabelais helped get published in Lyon with Sebastian Gryphe in 1534, is addressed to Du Bellay. Rabelais declares that it was a “title of glory” to have worked with Du Bellay (then bishop of Paris and counsellor to the king in his Privy Council) while he was entrusted with such a prestigious mission by the “invincible king Francis.”4 These visits to Rome with Jean Du Bellay provided Rabelais with much knowledge about how politics was actually carried out. Rabelais had first-hand knowledge of many important political events during his career. He was present, for example, when Francis i and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles v met in Aigues-Mortes in 1538. He was also present at the mock battle Cardinal Du Bellay organized to celebrate the birth of Henri ii’s son Louis on 14 May 1549 during his last trip to Rome. Rabelais’s Sciomachie, which describes this event and was published in Lyon in 1549, bears witness

2 For a detailed explanation of the contemporary issues covered by Rabelais in these letters see Richard Cooper, Rabelais et l’ Italie (Geneva: 1991), 32–47. 3 oc, 1013–1017. See note 7, 1757–1758. For the English translation, see cw, 773–776. 4 oc, 989; cw, 757–758.

rabelais and politics

101

to Rabelais’s exposure to the machinations typical of politics in Rome. The Sciomachie, which pays great attention to the mise en scène of the event, had multiple political aims. It aimed not only to stoke the patriotic ardor of French residents in Rome, and to antagonize the imperial camp, but also to vaunt, in its final ode addressed to Cardinal Du Bellay, the political union of France and Italy.5 It was also intended to restore Jean Du Bellay’s faltering credit in Rome. Unfortunately, it did not succeed in this latter goal and Du Bellay, who had fallen out of royal favor and was only a “temporary protector of the affairs of the French at the Court of Rome,” soon after learned that the titular holder of this post, Hippolyte d’Este, had been ordered to return to Rome.6 When Du Bellay left Rome in September of that year, Rabelais would accompany him. As his correspondence with d’Estissac and his Sciomachie show, while Rabelais might not have been an official member of the French court, he had a first-row view of many of the events and people that marked the political developments of his time. Rabelais’s practical understanding of politics would also be greatly enhanced by his experiences with Jean Du Bellay’s brother Guillaume, who was one of the most important French political actors of the 16th century. Rabelais joined Guillaume Du Bellay from 1539 to 1543 while he was governor of the Piedmont.7 Guillaume Du Bellay would remain in Italy until 1542 when he would return in ill health to France, where he died on 9 January 1543 near Lyon. Rabelais later praises Guillaume Du Bellay in the Quart Livre xxvi (1552) when Epistémon describes how good life in France had been when Du Bellay was alive, and how France had been maligned for a long time after his death.8 Guillaume Du Bellay’s government of the Piedmont provided Rabelais with a practical model for how to subjugate a conquered population, an important issue in both Gargantua and the Tiers Livre.9 In the Tiers Livre i (1546), the narrator proposes a moderate approach as the best way to govern Dipsody, a region which Pantagruel’s troops had recently conquered. As scholars have suggested, if Rabelais appreciated a moderate attitude toward a vanquished enemy, it may have been because he had seen how successful this politics of

5 See Cooper, Rabelais et l’ Italie, 73. 6 See Rabelais, Le Quart Livre, ed. R. Marichal (Geneva: 1947), xii; Lucien Romier, “Le dernier voyage de Rabelais en Italie,” rer 10 (1912): 113–142 (136). 7 For Guillaume Du Bellay, see Victor-Louis Bourrilly, Guillaume du Bellay, seigneur de Langey, 1491–1543 (Paris: 1904). 8 See oc, 600; cw, 493. 9 See Nicole Aronson, Les idées politiques de Rabelais (Paris: 1973), 127; Mireille Huchon, Rabelais (Paris: 2011), 268–269.

102

randall

“mansuetude” (gentleness) was during Guillaume Du Bellay’s peaceful government of the Piedmont after the conquest of 1536.10 If Rabelais’s treatment of political questions in his novels shows evidence of the kind of practical experience he would get with Guillaume Du Bellay, it also demonstrates a clear relationship with some of the most important theoretical texts of the time. When the narrator talks about the colonization of Dipsody, in the Tiers Livre, and the need to go to war more generally, in Gargantua, which was published in 1534 or 1535, well before Rabelais went to Italy with Guillaume Du Bellay, it is also easy to imagine Rabelais referring to more theoretical texts like Machiavelli’s The Prince (published in 1532, though distributed as early as 1513), as well as Claude de Seyssel’s Monarchie de France (1515). Seyssel, who addresses his book directly to Francis i at the time of his inauguration in 1515, says that the well-counselled king should think very hard about conquering other countries since such conquests had caused the kingdom of France more shame and harm when it lost them than it had acquired honor and profit when it won them.11 Seyssel goes on to explain how princes should act in order to maintain the confidence of recently conquered people.12 The subject is also dealt with by Machiavelli who devotes several pages in chapter iii of The Prince to how a ruler can maintain order in recently conquered territories and makes specific reference to the French King Louis xii’s attempt to conquer and rule territories in Italy.13 In his Tiers Livre, Rabelais seems to make a direct allusion to Machiavelli when he has the narrator say that instead of subjugating the conquered people by mistreating them horribly as “certains espritz tyrannicques” erroneously claim, the conquering power should take care of them as though they were a “newborn child” (enfant nouvellement né).14 Rabelais’s nurturing approach con10

11

12 13 14

Jacques Poujol cites Georges Lote to this effect. See Claude de Seyssel, La monarchie de France et deux autres fragments politiques, ed. J. Poujol (Paris: 1961), 49. See Georges Lote, “La politique de Rabelais (i): Principes et théories,” Revue des Cours et Conférences 37.1 (1935): 64–79 (78). See also Georges Lote, “La politique de Rabelais (iii): L’Empire, la papauté,” Revue des Cours et Conférences 37.5 (1936): 464–480 (467). See Seyssel, La Monarchie de France, 203. On Seyssel, see Gianni Mombello, “Claude de Seyssel: Un esprit modéré au service de l’ expansion française,” in Culture et pouvoir au temps de l’ Humanisme et de la Renaissance, ed. L. Terreaux (Geneva-Paris: 1978), 71–119; Patricia Eichel-Lojkine (ed.), Claude de Seyssel, c. 1450–1520: Écrire l’histoire, penser la politique en France, à l’ aube des temps modernes (Rennes: 2010); Rebecca Ard Boone, War, Domination, and the Monarchy of France: Claude de Seyssel and the Language of Politics in the Renaissance (Leiden: 2007). Seyssel, La monarchie de France, 211–214. See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. H.C. Mansfield Jr. (Chicago: 1985), 10–16. See oc, 354; cw, 262.

rabelais and politics

103

trasts strongly with Machiavelli’s advice that a prince must “offend” with infinite injuries a newly acquired country.15 Although Rabelais’s experience with Guillaume Du Bellay undoubtedly plays an important role in Rabelais’s understanding of how to treat recently conquered populations, the importance of these more theoretical texts cannot be minimized. They show how Rabelais, and others like him, might have felt more generally about these issues. As already mentioned, in Gargantua, which was published well before Guillaume Du Bellay was made governor of Turin in 1536, the king treats defeated inhabitants with great generosity, gaining their devotion and trust.16 Rabelais’s experience with Du Bellay merely reinforced what he already knew or felt regarding the proper treatment of conquered peoples. The same might be said about another issue Rabelais could have experienced during his time with Guillaume Du Bellay: the use of deception and ruses in war. This question is also related to one of the great mysteries of Rabelaisian scholarship. Rabelais is said to have written a work called Stratagemata on the use of military stratagems. This work, which is supposed to have been published around 1539, was apparently seen by a Rabelais scholar at a Paris bookseller’s in the 1930s. Before this scholar, Charles Perrat, could buy the book, it disappeared. It has never been seen since. Perrat described the book, which was moistened, ripped in places, and had missing pages, as being a collection of diplomatic documents designed to justify Du Bellay’s politics in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. He also adds that Rabelais, as a confidant of the Du Bellays, was in a better position than anyone else to defend their point of view.17 It has recently been suggested that in this work Rabelais made commentaries on Guillaume Du Bellay’s use of military stratagems by drawing on the firstcentury Stratagems by Sextus Julius Frontinus.18 Although Rabelais might have learned much about military and political practices during his time with Guillaume Du Bellay in Italy from 1539 to 1543, it would seem he already had a good grasp of stratagems as early as 1532 when he published Pantagruel, in which one finds a mix of virtuous and cunning 15

16 17 18

Machiavelli says “That follows from another natural and ordinary necessity which requires that one must always offend those over whom he becomes a new prince, both with menat-arms and with infinite other injuries that the new acquisition brings in its wake.” The Prince, 8. See also 65–68. See Gargantua, chapter 50, for Gargantua’s humane treatment of defeated inhabitants of a conquered land. Charles Perrat, “Le Polydore Virgile de Rabelais,” bhr 11 (1949): 167–204 (203–204). See Claude La Charité, “Rabelais’s Lost Stratagemata (ca. 1539): A Commentary on Frontinus,” in The Unfolding of Words: Commentary in the Age of Erasmus, eds. J. Rice Henderson and P.M. Swan, trans. K. Mak, and N. Senior (Toronto: 2012), 167–187 (169).

104

randall

behavior. In chapter 25, for example, Rabelais writes that Panurge and his companions kill 660 enemy soldiers by tricking them into a well-laid trap made up of hidden ropes.19 In chapter 28 of the same work, Pantagruel himself tricks the Dipsodes into thinking that he will attack the next day at noon, when, in fact, he means to attack that very evening.20 Since both Pantagruel and Gargantua were published well before Rabelais ever spent time with Guillaume Du Bellay in Italy, this means that they do not represent a specific political experience so much as a more general understanding of the relationship of ‘virtue’ and ‘necessity.’ The novel seems to share the same sort of complex understanding of dissimulation that Guillaume Du Bellay would describe in the prologue to his Ogdoades (begun in ca. 1524 and continued after 1536), which he intended to be an eight-part history of Francis i’s battles with Charles v. Du Bellay states that the “ruse ou dissimulation” committed by various people is less to be disdained than to be diligently observed.21 He wrote that although it might be better to obtain victory by virtue than by malice, the historian needs to take note of both.22 As Martin Du Bellay (another Du Bellay brother) says in his Mémoires, while honor might incite us, necessity constrains us.23 Rabelais’s characters, in a similar manner, were not afraid to have recourse to guile when necessity demanded it.

2

Rabelais and Royal Power

The question of Rabelais’s relationship with the French court has long been a source of critical inquiry. Scholars have long believed that Rabelais’s depictions of institutions such as the Roman papacy and the Sorbonne often followed the royal political line.24 It has even been suggested that Rabelais might have

19 20 21

22 23 24

oc, 303–304; cw, 214–215. oc, 312; cw, 222–223. Victor-Louis Bourrilly and Fleury Vindry (eds.), Mémoires de Martin et Guillaume du Bellay (Paris: 1912), vol. 4: 339. See Lote, “La politique de Rabelais (ii): L’Angleterre, l’Empire,” Revue des Cours et Conférences 37.4 (1936): 332–347 (336); see Huchon, Rabelais, 69. Mémoires de Martin et Guillaume du Bellay, vol. 4, 339–340. Mémoires de Martin et Guillaume du Bellay, vol. 1, 53. Huchon, Rabelais, 48. Cooper explains that even if Rabelais did not have personal knowledge of French diplomatic maneuvers, many of his political reflections are similar to those of the Du Bellay brothers, Rabelais et l’ Italie, 44. See also Georges Lote “La poltique de Rabelais,” 69. Verdun-Louis Saulnier, very differently, does not see Rabelais as representing the French crown. For Saulnier, Rabelais was simply a Gallican with good political “intelligence.” See Le dessein de Rabelais (Paris: 1957), 31–33.

rabelais and politics

105

played a political role as well as a medical one during his last trip to Rome with Jean Du Bellay.25 Perhaps even more importantly, Rabelais shows up on a list of maîtres des requêtes that Claude Chappuis, the bibliothécaire du roi, includes in his Discours de la cour in 1543.26 A Master of Requests was a high-level position in the government whose duties in the 16th century were large but somewhat vague.27 Robert Marichal has shown that the title was sometimes given to a certain number of people, writers as well as jurists, who enjoyed the privilege of freely approaching the king, but who were not strictly speaking “officers” of the court. Even if Rabelais was not a Master of Requests in the strict sense of the term, it is obvious, by his later years, that he was more than a simple doctor and famous writer. He was one of the “familiars” (domestiques) of the king, one who was a little bit out on the margins but who was up to date on some of the most secret intentions of those in power.28 Whatever the truth of the details regarding Rabelais’s official functions, it is clear that he enjoyed close proximity to those in power. However, if Rabelais was a strong defender of the French monarch, he was also more than willing to criticize the very concept of hereditary monarchy. In Gargantua i, the narrator mocks the concept of hereditary power, saying that he must be descended from a rich king or prince in olden times since no one wanted to be king or rich more than he did.29 And in chapter 30 of Pantagruel, when Epistémon comes back from the dead, he describes with comical brio how the powerful of the past had become very low and powerless. Alexander the Great repaired breeches, Xerxes sold mustard, Romulus was a salt vendor, etc.30 This episode casts doubt on the very foundation on which royal power depended. As Epistémon explains: “En ceste façon ceulx qui avoient esté gros Seigneurs en ce monde icy, guaingnoyent leur pauvre meschante et paillarde 25

26

27 28 29 30

See Robert Marichal, “Le dernier séjour de Rabelais à Rome,” Congrès de Tours et Poitiers (3–9 septembre 1953). Actes du Congrès (Paris: 1954), 104–132 (131); Gérard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophète. Études sur Pantagruel, Gargantua et Le Quart Livre, (er) 32 (Geneva: 1997), 479; Cooper, Rabelais et l’ Italie, 59. Lucien Romier emphasizes Rabelais’s medical duties in the employment of Jean Du Bellay during his last trip to Rome. See “Le dernier voyage de Rabelais en Italie,” 113–142, especially 140. On Rabelais’s trips to Italy more generally, see also Arthur Heulhard, Rabelais, ses voyages en Italie, son exil à Metz (Paris: 1891). Robert Marichal, “Rabelais, fut-il Maître des Requêtes?,” bhr 10 (1948): 171 (whole article 169–178). See also Abel Lefranc, “Rabelais secrétaire de Geoffroy d’Estissac et maître des requêtes,” rer 7 (1909): 411–413. Marichal, “Rabelais, fut-il Maître des Requêtes?,” 175. Marichal, “Rabelais, fut-il Maître des Requêtes?,” 178. oc, 10; cw, 7. oc, 322; cw, 231.

106

randall

vie là bas.” [In this way, those who had been great lords in this world earned their poor wretched slovenly living down there.]31 Rabelais was clearly able to be a patriotic subject of the French king and yet also maintain a critical distance that allowed him to condemn what he considered poor political behavior and to praise good. It was possible, and perhaps necessary, for Rabelais to criticize the concept of a hereditary monarchy while at the same time praising the monarch. For Rabelais, as for so many humanists, monarchy was the only political system imaginable.32 Claude de Seyssel explains in his Monarchie de France that “L’Etat monarchique est le meilleur.”33 Rabelais’s novels, his letters from Rome, and his Sciomachie offer abundant proof that he, like Seyssel, was a staunch partisan of a strong French monarchy. For Rabelais and his contemporaries, any and all political problems were understood in terms of the monarchy. Even if Rabelais’s contemporaries paid little consideration to other political systems, they did give much thought to how to control the power of the king. If monarchy was the only viable political option, then the question of the limits of monarchical will was of the utmost importance. As the French historian Roland Mousnier explained, it would take a revolution in the human spirit to transform the limited monarchy of the 15th century into the absolute monarchy that came to characterize the 17th century.34 Rabelais’s life (ca. 1483 to 1553) traverses a good part of this period and his novels reflect the changes in power to which Mousnier refers. The concept of absolute monarchy was not common in France at the end of the Middle Ages. Writers, theorists, and politicians throughout the 15th century had insisted on the limited nature of monarchical power. People like Jean Gerson, Philippe Pot, and Philippe de Commynes had insisted on the shared nature of sovereignty.35 In a speech he made before the French King Charles vi in 1405, Gerson declared that sovereignty was shared by king and people. At the Estates General held in Tours in 1484, Pot made a speech in which he said that the French king had the power because the people had given it to him. And Commynes explained in his Mém31 32 33 34

35

oc, 325; cw, 234. Jean Bichon, “Rabelais et la vie oeconomique,” er 7 (1967): 105–117 (113). Seyssel, La monarchie de France, 110. See Roland Mousnier, État et société sous François ier et pendant le gouvernement personnel de Louis xiv (Paris: 1966), 11. On the evolution of monarchical power in 16th-century France see also William Farr Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France: A Study in the Evolution of Ideas (Cambridge: 1941); Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton: 1980). See Michael Randall, The Gargantuan Polity: On the Individual and Community in the French Renaissance (Toronto: 2008), 86–94.

rabelais and politics

107

oires in the 1480s that the power of the French king was greater because he had not demanded that his subjects give him money to carry out his political plans but had been given it by the people as a gift. In all these writers, sovereignty was considered as shared by king and people, who had the right to reprimand the king, at least in theory, if they thought he had not met his part of the implicit bond tying them together.36 This concept of limited monarchical power evolves over the course of Rabelais’s life and throughout the 16th century. Claude de Seyssel declared the king’s power absolute in his Monarchie de France but placed three bridles on it: religion, justice, and police (what we might today call custom).37 The question at stake was how the power of a bad monarch could be controlled if his power was absolute.38 Jean Bodin’s Six Livres de la République (1576), published some sixty years later, after Rabelais’s death, represents an important step in the revolution that marked political theory and practice in the 16th century. Bodin removes the bridles Seyssel had placed on the monarch and explains that sovereignty given to a prince with conditions and charges is neither properly speaking sovereignty nor absolute power.39 Perhaps not surprisingly, the limits of monarchical power also play an important role in Rabelais’s novels, written between Seyssel and Bodin. So many of the rulers depicted in the novels function like moral portraits of good and bad rule. The good rulers tend to respect the limits placed on their power, while the bad ones do not. As Nicole Aronson has shown, humanists’ understanding of Greek and Roman politics tended to the conservative. Philosophically, they tended to appreciate writers such as Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, who were not exactly democratic.40 Rabelais, like other humanists, was a strong supporter of Francis i, who was not only a bastion of support against the Sorbonne, but also a strong promoter of French culture. When Grandgousier says in his letter to his

36 37

38

39

40

On late-medieval political systems see Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: 1966). Seyssel, La monarchie de France, 113–120. Church points out how Seyssel’s concept of monarchical power was dominated by the concept of “mutual obligation,” which was so important to feudal society (Constitutional Thought, 36). Seyssel, La monarchie de France, 115: “Car pour parler du désordre qui peut advenir par l’ imperfection des Chefs et Monarques, il y a plusieurs remèdes pour réfréner leur autorité absolue, s’ ils sont détravés et volontaires …” Jean Bodin: “… la souveraineté donnée à un Prince sous charges et conditions, n’est pas proprement souveraineté, ny puissance absolue si ce n’est que les conditions apposées en la création du Prince, soyent de la loy de Dieu ou de nature.”Les Six Livres de la République avec l’ Apologie de R. Herpin (1583; repr. Aalen: 1977), 128. Aronson, Les idées politiques de Rabelais, 26.

108

randall

son Gargantua that all the branches of learning have been reestablished and that Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, and Latin have been brought back to life, he echoes the thoughts of humanists like Rabelais who were thankful to Francis i for having established the Collège des lecteurs royaux in 1530, based on the Collège des trois langues started in Louvain in 1518.41 Rabelais’s position is similar to that of the Pléiade poet Joachim Du Bellay, a cousin of Jean and Guillaume Du Bellay, who praises the recently deceased French king Francis in his Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549) as “our deceased good king and father” (notre feu bon roi et père François) for having “returned all the good arts and sciences to their old status” (restitué tous les bons arts et sciences en leur ancienne dignité).42 Humanists like Rabelais and Joachim Du Bellay and the French king enjoyed a kind of symbiotic relationship. The humanists profited from the king’s strong defense of the arts and protection from the Sorbonne, while the king profited from the humanists’ development of French culture which helped unify the political identity of the French state. The portraits Rabelais creates of monarchs in his novels can have dual political functions. While his descriptions of powerful and paternal monarchs like Grandgousier and Gargantua might be used as a means of praising contemporary princes, these portraits also functioned as rebukes to those tyrannical monarchs who did not conform to the model of moderation. As one 19thcentury critic observed, when Rabelais liberally praises the ideal king, he is also discreetly addressing the real king.43 The novels function as Renaissance versions of medieval “miroirs des princes” which offered rulers images of how a good king should behave. Some critics have described Grandgousier as a mix of late-medieval feudal lord and king in the fashion of Francis i.44 V.-L. Saulnier considered that the king closest to Rabelais’s heart was the sovereign father of the people, and that Gargantua was more like the patriarchal Louis xii, who reigned from 1498 to 1515, than either Francis i (r. 1515 to 1547), or Henri ii (r. 1549 to 1559), his successors who showed more domineering tendencies.45 Other critics also have seen Grandgousier and Gargantua as more like Louis xii than Francis i.46 As these allusions to Louis xii indicate, the Rabelaisian monarch might have all

41 42 43 44 45 46

oc, 243; cw, 160. Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets, précédé de Les Antiquités de Rome, et suivi de La Défense et Illustration de la Langue française, ed. S. de Sacy (Paris: 1967), 209. Hermann Ligier, La politique de Rabelais (Paris: 1880), 46–47. Bichon, “Rabelais et la vie oeconomique,” 115. Saulnier, Le dessein de Rabelais, 32. Lote, “La politique de Rabelais,” 68.

rabelais and politics

109

the power, but he only had it because he remembered he was obligated to his people. In many ways Grandgousier is like the moderate monarch whose power was grounded in his obligation to his subjects, a monarch like those described by 15th-century theorists including Commynes and Philippe Pot.47 In Gargantua, Grandgousier says that he will undertake a war against Picrochole because he is obligated to protect his people. He is obligated to defend them as part of his role as king.48 Grandgousier’s decision to go to war because of his obligation to his people places him in the same political tradition as the monarchs praised by Gerson, Commynes, Pot et alii. His sovereignty was shared with his people and if he did not recognize the common bond tying him to his people, he would cease being a monarch and become a tyrant.49 Rabelais, like Seyssel, was distrustful of absolute power as it was being formulated in the entourage of Francis i.50 Although he might be a defender of the French king, the sort of patriarchal and feudal power he gave his kings in Gargantua and Pantagruel would seem to make him critical of the kind of power Francis i’s chancellor Duprat described in 1518 when he was fighting with the Parliament of Paris to get them to approve the Concordat of Bologna. This agreement, which Francis had devised with Pope Leo x in 1516, and which would have decreased the power of the Gallican church and increased the power of both the pope and the king, was resisted with great force by the Parliament, which only accepted it under duress. During his deliberations with the Parliament, Duprat declared that the Parliament was not a Roman senate and did not have the ability or the right to oppose the king’s will.51 Where Francis i’s chancellor was expressing the new political reality in which the king’s power was increasingly absolute, Rabelais’s monarchs would seem to be similar to earlier monarchs whose power was limited by the mutual obligation tying them to their people. 47 48

49

50 51

Aronson argues that “Rabelais’s monarchy is ‘moderate’.” See Les idées politiques de Rabelais, 66. Grandgousier says: “Mais il fault je le voy bien, que maintenant de harnoys je charge mes pauvres espaules lasses et foibles, et en ma main tremblante je preigne la lance et la masse, pour secourir et guarantir mes pauvres subjectz.” (oc, 83); “… but I must, as I clearly see, burden my weary enfeebled shoulders with armor, and take into my trembling hand the mace to help and safeguard my poor subjects” (cw, 70). On the development of absolutism during reign of Francis i, see Jacques Poujol, “1515: Cadre idéologique du développement de l’ absolutisme en France à l’avènement de François ier,” in Théorie et pratique politiques à la Renaissance: xviie colloque international de Tours (Paris: 1977), 259–272. See also Robert J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis i (Cambridge: 1994). See Poujol’s introduction to La monarchie de France, 49. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron, 97; Randall, The Gargantuan Polity, 39.

110

randall

Education is one of the most efficacious means of controlling the will of the king, as both Erasmus and Guillaume Budé, who exercised a powerful influence on Rabelais, explain. Erasmus explained in his Education of a Christian Prince (1516) that when the prince is born to office and not elected, then the main hope of getting a good one depends on his proper education. If it is impossible to vote for a leader then his education needs to be managed with all the more care.52 Guillaume Budé in his Education of the Prince (published in 1547, but composed between 1515 and 1522), opined that knowledge (science) is more necessary for those who are like the great princes and monarchs, such as the kings of France.53 The letter Gargantua sends to his son Pantagruel in Pantagruel viii and the chapters devoted to the education of the prince in Gargantua show that this idea had a strong hold in Rabelais’s political universe. Gargantua tells Pantagruel in his letter that his father had wanted him to be as knowledgeable as possible in “sçavoir politique.” Pantagruel, he says, should be able to do even more now that letters and literature have been brought back to their proper level.54 The chapters devoted to Gargantua’s education in Gargantua (xiii–xxiv) also exhibit the same sort of attention paid to the prince’s education. Just as Philip, the king of Macedon, made Aristotle his son Alexander’s teacher, so too Grandgousier will provide a tutor for his son.55 In Rabelais’s political universe, the best way of ensuring that the king was a good ruler was to make sure that he had a good education.

3

Personal Freedom

If the limits of the king’s power play an important role in many 16th-century political treatises and in Rabelais’s novels, the question of the will of the king’s subjects plays an equally important part. A well-governed society is one in which individuals can exercise their will, and a society in which subjects have no individual liberty is a form of tyranny. Erasmus insists in his Complaint of Peace (1516) that the success of a prince is measured, at least in part, by his ability to rule over a free people. He says that a “king should think himself great if the subjects he rules are of the very best, happy if he makes his people happy,

52 53 54 55

Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. and eds. N.M. Cheshire and M.J. Heath, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 27, ed. A.H.T. Levi (Toronto: 1986), 206. Guillaume Budé, Le livre de l’ institution du prince (ch. 1-xx), ed. Maxim Marin (New York: 1983), 136. oc, 243; cw, 160. oc, 42; cw, 37.

rabelais and politics

111

exalted if the men he governs enjoy the greatest measure of freedom, wealthy if they are wealthy, prosperous if his cities prosper in unbroken peace.”56 Erasmus goes on to say that the king should exercise his powers within limits, remembering that he is a human being and a free man ruling over men who are also free.57 The people in their turn should defer to him only so far as is in the public interest.58 In De la servitude volontaire, written in 1549 but published in 1574, and perhaps one of the most important essays on political freedom in the 16th century, Etienne de la Boétie explains that we are free by nature since we are all “companions.”59 He goes on to say that not only are we born free, but that we are also born with a natural propensity to defend our freedom. Personal freedom is at the heart of what has long been considered the most important political institution in all of Rabelais’s novels, the Abbey of Thelema, which is found at the end of Gargantua. The Abbey seems to be characterized by a logical paradox. In fact, this paradox reveals an essential fact of Renaissance politics. It can seem contradictory to have a motto that orients the political universe around individual will—“do you as you will”—when all the inhabitants in the abbey end up dressing and behaving in the same way. However, the transformation of that individual will into a common behavior is only paradoxical if a modern understanding of the relationship of the individual and the community, which favors the former over the latter, is kept in mind. If an early modern understanding, which insisted on the primacy of the community in the political economy is kept in mind, then the paradox disappears. As Marie-Luce Demonet has explained, individual will (Gr. thelema) is transformed into a collective will (Thélème).60 There is the initial act of free will that is invested in each individual, and there is a second act of free will also when the individual gives up that initial free will for the common good. This second act of free will for the sake of the common good is central to the overall political economy of the novels. It motivates Gargantua in his message to Picrochole during their war in Gargantua. Gargantua tells one of Picrochole’s captains whom he has captured to return to his ruler and tell him to never act for the sake of his private interest because to do so endangers the common

56 57 58 59 60

Erasmus, Complaint of Peace (Querela pacis), trans. B. Radice, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 27, 311. Erasmus, Complaint of Peace, 311–312. Erasmus, Complaint of Peace, 312. Etienne de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire, eds. A. and L. Tournon, followed by Les Paradoxes de la servitude volontaire (Paris: 2002), 31–32. Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris: 1992), 281.

112

randall

good.61 When the common interest is imperiled, so too, Grandgousier insists, is the private interest. This very simple evangelical moral imperative suffuses so much of the politics in Rabelais’s novels. The necessity to love one another characterizes both Pantagruel’s love for Panurge and Grandgousier’s need to go to war with Picrochole and creates a coherent politics from the most personal level to the most public.

4

Bad Kings: Picrochole

If Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel provide vivid examples of what good government should look like, other rulers such as Picrochole in Gargantua and Gaster in the Quart Livre provide equally vivid portraits of what bad government looks like. One of the most important and troubling characters in all of Rabelais’s novels is the irascible King Picrochole, who declares war on his friend and neighbor Grandgousier in Gargantua for what seem like spurious reasons. As many critics have pointed out, Rabelais’s portrayal of Picrochole is most likely based on the behavior of Charles v, the king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor.62 Charles v is an obvious source for the portrait Rabelais paints of the irascible King Picrochole who attacks Grandgousier’s subjects for little reason. When the narrator of Gargantua describes the megalomania of Picrochole, whose advisors have him taking over a huge part of the world, it is difficult not to see an allusion to Charles v, especially as seen from the French point of view. The description of Picrochole’s desire for universal conquest also corresponds closely with Charles v’s own desires of conquest.63 The emperor’s title in 1534, which besides indicating the European countries and regions under his control such as Germany, Castilla, Sicily as well as the “Indian islands” (iles indes) and the “terra firma” (terres fermes) of the Indian Ocean, also indicates that he is the “dominateur” in Asia and Africa and king of New Spain, Peru, and other places in the new world.64 A critique of this sort of universal monarchy appears 61 62 63

64

oc, 125; cw, 106. See Lote, “La politique de Rabelais,” 77; Huchon, Rabelais, 55; Michael Screech, “Some Reflexions on the Problem of Dating ‘Gargantua, A’ and ‘B’,” er 11 (1974): 9–56 (24). Charles v’s battles with Barbarossa in early 1535 provide much of the material for this episode. Barbarossa, an Ottoman admiral, had taken Tunis in August 1534, and Charles v had begun to try to retake the city in early 1535, laying siege from 20 June to 14 July 1535. Many allusions in the Picrocholine war refer to these events. See oc, 1054, 1140–1141, n. 7. See also Screech, “Some Reflexions on the Problem of Dating ‘Gargantua’.” See Claire Sicard, “Picrochole au miroir de Charles Quint,” Cornucopia. Le Verger, bouquet 1,

rabelais and politics

113

in Gargantua xxxiii, when Picrochole’s counsellors advise him to continue his military campaign against Grandgousier to include countries as widely dispersed as Sardinia, Rhodes, Asia Minor, Armenia, and Babylon. Since the novels are not simply romans à clef, it could be that Rabelais is making a more general statement regarding monarchs’ unbridled desire for conquest. Rabelais may also have been trying to warn all princes in general about trying to conquer countries. Picrochole, despite possibly being a portrait of Charles v, also serves as a broader miroir des princes in which monarchs can see the image of the kind of tyrant they should not be. As already mentioned, Seyssel advises the French king in his Monarchie de France not to invade other countries without good reason. Mireille Huchon sees this episode (G xxxiii) as responding also to a passage in Thomas More’s Utopia, in which the author criticizes the French king’s appetite for conquest.65 More imagines being at an ultra-secret meeting of the French king with his council in which they discuss the means and stratagems necessary to conquer all of Italy, as well as Burgundy, and all the other countries he had already invaded in his mind. In the 19th century, Hermann Ligier explained that in the give and take between Pichrochole and his advisers, it was almost as if one could hear a conversation between the 15th-century French king Charles viii, whose desire to conquer large parts of Italy was responsible for starting much of the Italian Wars, and his adviser Vesc.66 Once again, though Rabelais seems to represent a negative understanding of Charles v in his depiction of Picrochole, it is possible that he was also making a more general point. If Grandgousier was the model of a good king, then Picrochole was the model of a bad one.

5

Bad Kings: Gaster

Tyranny was the specter that haunted many political treatises of Gerson, Commynes et alii. The prince who did not recognize the bonds tying him to his people and who drew all the blood in the political body to himself represented a mortal threat to the good health of the polis. If Grandgousier playing on the grass with his subjects in Gargantua represents an ideal monarch, Gaster, who appears in the Quart Livre, represents his polar opposite. Where Grand-

65 66

janvier 2012, 12. http://cornucopia16.com/blog/2014/07/22/janvier‑2012‑claire‑sicard‑u‑pa ris‑diderot‑picrochole‑au‑miroir‑de‑charles‑quint/. See oc, 1140, n. 2. Ligier, La politique de Rabelais, 58.

114

randall

gousier ruled his subjects out of a sense of loyalty to them, and his kingdom was filled with people exercising their will for the greater good, Gaster rules by fear. Gaster reduced his subjects to unthinking sycophants who only know to obey the monarch’s will. The portrait of Gaster demonstrates how Rabelais could be both an enthusiastic supporter of the French monarch, and a staunch critic of the abuse of power. His support of Francis i and Henri ii necessitated in some ways his portrayal of bad monarchs like Gaster and Picrochole. By producing portraits of good kings that could be associated with the French monarch he was also able to draw attention to what bad monarchs might look like.67 Like Gerson in his Vivat Rex, Rabelais could praise the king and at the same time give him a cautionary lesson of what not to do. The Pantagruelians come across Gaster during their quest to find the Dive Bouteille that would resolve the dilemma about whether to get married or not, the situation which had ended the Tiers Livre. Gaster’s kingdom is a satirical version of Hesiod’s Mount of Virtue.68 Gaster has no ears, meaning he cannot hear his subjects’ entreaties, and rules by fear; all those around him quake before him like animals before the lion’s roar. It is important that there is no language or exchange in Gaster’s kingdom.69 Aristotle had described human beings as political animals since they could use speech to make judgements about good and bad.70 Since there is no language in Gaster’s kingdom, this becomes a non-political space in stark contrast with Grandgousier’s kingdom where his subjects use language constantly to communicate with the king. Gaster’s sycophantic subjects, the Engastrimythes and the Gastrolatres, vie with each to do his bidding. Gaster’s kingdom, in which there is no bond between prince and people, represents a kind of nightmare vision of monarchical, absolute power as that power was being redefined more and more in terms of the king’s own will. The power of Rabelais’s critique of Gaster calls to mind the verve of later monarchomaque authors such as François Hotman, Théodore de Bèze, and Agrippa d’Aubigné, who wrote powerfully against the concept of absolute

67 68 69

70

Ligier, La politique de Rabelais, 47: “Les éloges libéralement décernés au roi idéal sont autant de conseils discrètement adressés au roi réel.” See Terence Cave, “Reading Rabelais: Variations on the Rock of Virtue,” Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, eds. P. Parker and D. Quint (Baltimore: 1986), 78–95 (79). ql 57: “Il ne parle que par signes. Mais à ses signes tout le monde obeist plus soubdain que aux edictz des Præteurs et mandemens des Roys.” (cw, 561: “He speaks only by signs. But his signs everyone obeys more promptly than the edicts of praetors and commands of kings.”). Aristotle, The Politics, trans. C. Lord (Chicago: 1984), 37.

rabelais and politics

115

monarchy through the beginning of the 17th century.71 Hotman’s Francogallia (1573) criticized those who believed that the lex regia in Roman law had meant that the people of the Roman Empire had conceded all its power and authority to the king. For Hotman, the term “absolute power” was barbarous and inappropriate.72 Bèze would also later react strongly to monarchical absolutism in his Du droit des magistrats (1574) as would Aubigné who insisted right into the 17th century that the princeps and the populus were tied together by bonds of mutual obligation. While Rabelais might have been a staunch partisan of a strong French monarchy, he shared with these later writers who were more overt in their opposition to an absolute monarch a distrust of a prince with uncontrolled power.

6

Ecclesiastical Polity

Although Rabelais might share these later writers’ concerns about the excesses of monarchical absolutism, he was not, as they were, a Protestant. His position regarding the Catholic Church was more Gallican than Protestant in nature. The Gallican Church can be explained in either ecclesiastical or political terms.73 There was a longstanding tradition in France that considered the Gallican Church as enjoying certain privileges and independence from Rome due to ancient historical traditions. One of the high points in the history of the Gallican Church was reached some fifty years before Rabelais’s birth, in 1438, with the composition of the Pragmatic Sanction, while one of its most dramatic crises, in 1550–1552, shaped the context of Rabelais’s Quart Livre, published in 1552. The Pragmatic Sanction was written in Bourges by many of the same people who took part at the Council of Basel (1431–1449) that deposed the pope Eugene iv in Rome and replaced him with another called Felix v in 1439. Grounding its authority in the same broad-based conception of ecclesiastical polity developed at the Council of Basel, the Pragmatic Sanction affirmed the

71 72 73

See Julian H. Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (New York: 1969). Randall, The Gargantuan Polity, 205. For an overview of Gallicanism, see John H.M. Salmon, Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge: 1987), 156–162; Frank L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: 2005), 656–657. For the political nature of the relationship between papacy and France, see Lote, “La politique de Rabelais (iii): L’ Empire, la papauté.”

116

randall

autonomy of the Gallican Church. Based on this decentralized understanding of church structure, the Pragmatic Sanction insisted that the pope did not have the right to counteract any election or nomination made by a church, cathedral, or monastery.74 Nor could the Church of Rome demand payment of annates, which were the fees paid for all vacant benefices.75 The decentralized politics of the Pragmatic Sanction were reversed by the Concordat of Bologna which was negotiated by Pope Leo x and Francis i in 1516. Grounding its concept of ecclesiastical power in ideas developed at the Fifth Lateran Council (1512 to 1517), the Concordat enabled the pope, by the “fullness of his power,” to abrogate the Pragmatic Sanction and forbid all cathedrals and churches in France from electing any future prelates. Instead, the king of France would nominate a suitable candidate to the pope.76 The decentralized polity of the Pragmatic Sanction and the Gallican Church had clearly been over-ridden. The divergent ideas of ecclesiastical polity represented in the Pragmatic Sanction and the Concordat of Bologna come to a head in what has been called the Gallican crisis of 1550–1552.77 The relationship of pope, king, and church almost came to the breaking point during this crisis. The reign of Henri ii began amid disputes with the papacy about annates, the right of the pope to appoint vacancies caused by the death of French prelates visiting Rome, and the inclusion of Brittany and Provence within the terms of the Concordat.78 The newly elected pope, Julius iii, defied the French king by reconvening the Council of Trent, and ignored an alliance the French had with the duchy of Parma. Julius

74 75 76

77

78

La Pragmatique Sanction et le traicte de Guillermus paraldi nouvellement imprime a Pars par Gaspard Philippe (Paris: 1508), f. xx v. La Pragmatique Sanction, f. lviii. v. Concordat entre Léon x, Souverain Pontife, et François Ier, Roi de France (n.l.: 1817), 33. Although the Concordat does not bring up the subject of the annates specifically, Leo x and Francis i reestablished them by secret agreement. See Robert Marichal, “Quart Livre: Commentaires,” er 5 (1964): 137. Rabelais alludes to both the Pragmatic Sanction and the Lateran Council in the Tiers Livre. In chapter 41 of the Tiers Livre, the judge Bridoye explains that a certain Perrin Dandin, who was an appoincteur des proces (a referee used to bring about settlements in a suit) had seen the “grand bonhomme Concile de Latran, avec son gros chapeau rouge, et avec lui la bonne dame Pragmatique Sanction, sa femme, avec son large tissu de satin pers, et son gros chapelet de jais” (oc, 479) (“… that great fellow Lateran Council, with his broad red hat, and with him his wife, the good lady Pragmatic Sanction, with her ‘wide headband of sky-blue satin and her great jet rosary’.” [cw, 380]). On the Gallican crisis see Lucien Romier, “La crise gallicane,” Revue historique, vol. 108 fascicule 2 (1911): 225–250; “La crise gallicane, suite et fin,” Revue historique, vol. 109, fascicule 1 (1912): 27–55. See Salmon, Renaissance and Revolt, 158–159; Huchon, Rabelais, 351; oc, 1465–1466; Defaux, Rabelais agonistes, 482–484.

rabelais and politics

117

wanted to take the duchy of Parma away from Ottavio Farnese, who was an ally of the French, and give it to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles v, who had ordered Ottavio’s father assassinated. The crisis was on the verge of becoming even more dramatic, when Henri promised total war in Italy, called on the Sultan Suleiman as an ally, and contemplated convening a Council of the Gallican Church and naming a patriarch. Schism was only just avoided, but French bishops were forbidden by royal command from attending the council at Trent. The basic issues at stake in the Gallican Church’s dispute with the Vatican hierarchy are at the heart of ql xlviii–liii.79 The papacy as well as the decretals, which are the means by which papal authority is enacted, are here brought into range of Rabelais’s satirical cannons. The Corpus iuris canonici (Body of Canon Law) was made up of two parts, the first composed of the decretum published by Gratian before 1150, and the second made up of later decretals affirming the temporal power of the popes. In ql li, Homenaz specifically mentions these later decretals by name, calling them “Seraphicque Sixiesme” (those published by Boniface viii in 1298), “Cherubicques Clementines” (those published by Clement v in 1313), and “Extravaguantes Angelicques” (those published by John xxii and his successors).80 Rabelais makes a distinction between Gratian’s Decree, which he calls “holy” in Chapter 58, and the decretals.81 The Gallican Church, and Rabelais, might have accepted the decree published by Gratian, but they were resolutely opposed to those which were issued by later popes.82 In the Quart Livre, Rabelais mocks the entire concept of papal authority as exercised through the decretals when he has the Papimanes explain that they would kiss the pope’s testicles because the decretals say so.83 When Rabelais satirizes the Papimanes’ veneration of the Decretals as a kind of divinely inspired text, and the pope as a God on Earth, he represents a very Gallican position. The “Isle Sonante” chapters of the Cinquième Livre are likewise a blistering satire of the ultramontane interpretation of ecclesiastical polity. In these chapters (cl i–viii) Rabelais depicts an island in which bells constantly ring, in which fasting is practiced, and which is inhabited by birds called Cler79

80 81 82

83

For detailed commentary on these chapters, see Marichal, “Quart Livre: Commentaires,” 100–133. See also Screech, L’ Évangélisme de Rabelais: Aspects de la satire religieuse au xvie siècle, (er) 2 (Geneva: 1959): 77–86. oc, 657; cw, 547. See Heulhard, Rabelais, 332–333. oc, 674. See oc, 1564, note 1. See also cw, 562. Georges Lote explains that, from the Gallican position, the decretals were an instrument of tyranny and oppression that the papacy intended to use to reduce the world to obedience. See his “La politique de Rabelais (iii): l’ Empire, la papauté.” oc, 650; cw, 541.

118

randall

gaux, Monagaux, Prestregaux, Abbegaux, Evesgaux, and Cardingaux, etc. All of them are under the authority of a Papegaut (parrot). As Mireille Huchon explains, Rabelais puts into question the entire clerical organization by the sharp-edged satire of these chapters.84 Unlike the questions of grace and free will, which come up elsewhere in the novels, these chapters deal with problems of authority and power. They are eminently political in nature and come back to the questions underlying so many of the discussions brought up during the history of Gallicanism. As Robert Marichal said of the Gallican Crisis itself, the conflict at stake is exclusively political.85 Who, finally, has the power in the church? Is it the pope, who is symbolically depicted as a cornerstone of the church by the Fifth Lateran Council and the Concordat, or is it the church, as an “assembly of the faithful” (congregatio fidelium), as the Pragmatic Sanction and the Councils of Basel and Constance believed? These are the same questions found throughout political treatises by Gerson, Commynes, Seyssel, Bodin, Hotman et alii. It is no coincidence that so many of the political treatises written in the latter part of the 16th century refer to the earlier texts and authors related to the Councils of Basel and Constance. If the context of these questions was religious, the issues at stake were often political. As is so often the case, there is a paradox at the heart of Rabelais’s critique of top-down ecclesiastical authority. It would appear clear from the portrait of Homenaz that Rabelais was a strong partisan of the Gallican Church and an opponent of the hierarchical understanding of ecclesiastical polity like the one developed at the Fifth Lateran Council. It is ironic therefore that Rabelais’s own career might have been given a crucial boost by the Concordat of Bologna which strengthened the hand of both king and pope and weakened the independence of the Gallican Church. While Rabelais’s Quart Livre might vilify the abuses of the papacy especially as they were expressed in the Concordat of Bologna, Rabelais himself might actually have benefitted from this document since it allowed the French king to name his benefactor, Geoffroy d’ Estissac, as Bishop of Maillezais in 1518. Had it not been for the Concordat of Bologna and the Lateran Council, d’Estissac might never have been named bishop and Rabelais’s career might have been quite different. D’Estissac provided crucial early support to Rabelais in 1524, when he named him his personal secretary, and he 84 85

oc, 729–746; oc, nn. 1601, 1621; cw, 615–630. Marichal, “Quart Livre, Commentaires,” 103. Lucien Romier also insists on the political nature of the crisis, “La crise gallicane de 1551,” 225: “À l’avènement de Henri ii, le principe était depuis longtemps admis, dans les conseils du roi, que le pape agit plus souvent comme souverain temporel que comme chef religieux.”

rabelais and politics

119

would remain a major source of support for Rabelais throughout much of his life, as Rabelais’s entreaty for money makes clear in his letter from Rome in 1535.86

7

Conclusion

Rabelais’s fictional world is a very political one in the sense that it has to do with people, real and imperfect people, and how they organize their societies. The novels and the other writings constantly refer to very basic political questions concerning who has the power and how is it exercised. Whether it is Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel who offer examples of good government, or Picrochole and Gaster who do the opposite, the question of power and its use is never far from the narrative flow of the novels. Rabelais does not write a political treatise, but he does offer exceptionally vivid portrayals of good and bad governance. Rabelais’s fictional world forms a perfect example of mediocritas in its moderate stance regarding human nature. Almost all the characters in Rabelais’s novels are imperfect, even characters like Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel. Yet Rabelais’s novels are also marked by a general optimism about human beings despite their failings. Rabelais’s novels differ from both Thomas More’s Utopia and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Even if More’s novel of ideas is part of Pantagruel and Gargantua’s political and philosophical dna, the political universe of Rabelais’s novels is not utopian. His characters are not perfect, not even their eponymous heroes. And yet Rabelais does not think it necessary to impose the sorts of harsh remedies Machiavelli prescribes in The Prince. Rabelais was too keen an observer of human behavior to ever think that we are capable of creating a perfect state. At the same time, Rabelais’s novels are marked by a kind of optimism in the capacity of human beings to organize themselves into coherent and relatively just societies. Good rulers need to nurture their subjects and not impose tyrannical control on them. This optimism in human imperfection is seen in the Abbey of Thelema, as well as the polises of Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel. Perhaps the best word to describe the political universe of Rabelais’s novels is ‘complex.’ Rabelais’s novels refuse to be pigeonholed into any system or world view. Although they have since 86

See oc, 1001, 1012; cw, 763, 772; Huchon, Rabelais, 90. For Francis i’s nomination of d’ Estissac as Bishop of Maillezais, see Marguerite Boulet, “Les élections épiscopales en France au lendemain du Concordat de Bologne (1516–1531),” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’ histoire 57.57 (1940): 190–234 (206).

120

randall

been used to explain a worldview, as in André Glucksmann’s Maîtres penseurs, where Thelema is construed as a gulag avant la lettre and Panurge as a symbol of democratic freedom, Rabelais’s complex characters and situations resist any such reductionism.87 They are exemplary of what Milan Kundera said of novels generally: they are the literary form that best resists totalitarian control since they represent the complexity of human existence.88 Rabelais’s novels, finally, offer us a view of a world in which human imperfection, even the prince’s, is built into the ideal political state. It is only those polises that refuse to recognize the limits of human power and understanding that pose a threat to life. It is a lesson we can profit from even today. 87 88

André Glucksmann, Les maîtres penseurs (Paris: 1977). Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (London and Boston: 1986), 14: “By which I mean: The world of one single Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of the novel are molded of entirely different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel.”

chapter 5

Greco-Roman Tradition and Reception Romain Menini

A humanist in the full sense of the term (i.e., an indefatigable reader of the ancients), Rabelais, like the rest of his time—the time of Erasmus and Guillaume Budé—, had a passion for rediscovering, studying, and acquiring a deep understanding of his Greco-Roman heritage. Whether in his so-called scholarly works (introductions to, publications, and annotations of Greek, Latin, or neo-Latin texts) or in his French-language fiction, he put into practice, with a respect always mixed with irreverence, the credo of Renaissance philologists: ad fontes, “back to the sources.” At the risk of spoiling their purity or of tarnishing their nobility, Rabelais indulged in rewriting the greatest authors of antiquity in order to plunder, before Joachim Du Bellay did so, the most beautiful treasures in their temple. This rapine—high-class predation—amounts to a homage to the scholars of the past. Doctors, naturalists, agronomists, fish experts, rhetoricians, novelists, grammarians, lexicographers, philosophers, playwrights, moralists, chroniclers, historians, geographers, surveyors, tacticians, doxographers, and compilers of curiosities: it would appear that none of the Greco-Latin authors of antiquity known in the 16th century escaped the curiosity of the author of the Quart livre. Lists of names—whether illustrious or obscure—are very numerous in the Five Books. They attest to the encyclopedic passion of an author who was attentive to all genres and almost all styles, to all tones and all subjects—in a word to anything having to do with “antiquaille.” This is also because the Renaissance preceded the advent of the literary canon, with its exclusivity and pretentions to purity, which would progressively emerge in Europe during the 19th century: at this earlier period, everything that had come down from antiquity was read, with little regard for distinctions of period (Greek ‘archaism’ or ‘low Latin’) or for questions of classroom propriety. As his works featuring Pantagruel progressed, the number of references to Greco-Latin literature grew constantly; the Quart livre, the author’s testament, was the culmination of this Greco-Latin journey, which went back in time in the hope of travelling to the future: a tempestuous crossing of the boundless riches of the classical tradition, a witty hymn to the realia of the old Mediterranean world, a breezy dip in the very sources of knowledge. In Pantagruel, the father of the young giant bears witness to a realization that was one that Rabelais himself had come to: Pantagruel’s contemporaries

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_007

122

menini

at last could benefit from an unprecedented perspective, and a new light that was being shed on a whole section of their Western European culture. This shining renewal, which would soon be graced with the name Renaissance, was an unbelievable opportunity. The Greek and Italian philologists of the previous century had been tirelessly editing and translating neglected vestiges of GrecoLatin civilization; the printing press, which was in one of its golden ages during Rabelais’s lifetime, had just begun to make possible a greater diffusion of these uncommonly tasty leftovers from the banquet of antiquity. Gargantua, a man from the previous generation, was not unaware of this cultural turning point. He is anxious that his son should not miss the crucial importance of this European revolution, with its renewed emphasis on the ‘humanities,’ humaniores litteræ: Now all branches of learning are reestablished, languages restored: Greek, without which it is shameful for a man to call himself learned; Hebrew, Chaldean, Latin; truly elegant and correct printings are now customary, which were invented in my time by divine inspiration, as was, conversely, artillery by diabolical suggestion. The whole world is full of erudites, of very learned teachers, of very ample libraries; and, in my judgment, neither in Plato’s time, nor in Cicero’s, nor Papinian’s, were there such facilities for study as we see now; and henceforth no one must appear in public or in company if he is not well polished in Minerva’s workshop.1 cw, 160

It is in this not merely idealist, but one might say missionary, view that Gargantua has of science and the scientists of his day—which were, as has sometimes been pointed out, tough to the point of caricature with the ‘Gothic darkness’ which had supposedly preceded their marvelous age—, that the sincerity and authenticity of Rabelais’s belief in study comes through. Europe at the beginning of the 16th century, says Gargantua, is right up there with the most shining periods of human intellectual endeavor that have set the standard (a standard which for once had been outdone): Athens in its heyday (standing for 1 Maintenant toutes disciplines sont restituées, les langues instaurées, Grecque sans laquelle c’est honte que une personne se die sçavant, Hebraicque, Caldaicque, Latine. Les impressions tant elegantes et correctes en usance, qui ont esté inventées de mon eage par inspiration divine, comme à contrefil l’ artillerie par suggestion diabolicque. Tout le monde est plein de gens savans, de precepteurs tresdoctes, de librairies tresamples, qu’il m’est advis que ny au temps de Platon, ny de Ciceron, ny de Papinian n’ estoit telle commodité d’estude qu’on y veoit maintenant. Et ne se fauldra plus doresnavant trouver en place ny en compaignie qui ne sera bien expoly en l’officine de Minerve. (P, viii, 243–244)

greco-roman tradition and reception

123

the entirety of ‘classical’ Greece), certain highpoints of republican or imperial Rome. Looking upon these two great poles of antiquity, Renaissance man could now see himself as more than a mere dwarf, but once again a new giant on the shoulders of the titans of old. In 1547, some fifteen years later, when the author of the Tiers livre was experiencing major difficulties and was asking for help from his protector, the cardinal Du Bellay, what he professed to fear most of all was nothing other than “dommaige et perte evidente de [s]es estudes”2 (“evident harm and loss to [his] studies,” cw, 787). Even though life was a reminder of the coarseness of everyday existence, we find Rabelais consistently returning to studia humanitatis, a constant source of inspiration for him: this scholarly work consisted above all of reading, trying to understand, commenting, and meditating on GrecoLatin authors. In this respect, his works featuring Pantagruel (also) represented the result (or perhaps the ransom?) of such “estudes,” and even the singular response to the scholar, amateur, inquirer, and mocker that coexisted within him, and which had always been informed, fascinated, puzzled, and entertained by the works of antiquity. For an author who chose expressly to write in the vernacular, for someone who was interested in showing how this ‘vulgaire’ emerged, and who was extremely attentive to its “éternelle fabrique” (Cinquiesme livre, Prologue, 726), the Greco-Latin tradition was a peerless resource. Thanks to it, Rabelais practiced the translatio studii in his own—altered—fashion, drawing forms, themes, and words from the reservoir of antiquity. Greek and Latin works, which were always in the picture, functioned by turns as points of departure or promised lands, focal points or trick mirrors, models or targets—sometimes they fulfilled all of these functions at once.

1

Latin—and Greek

Like Erasmus, and like Budé, Rabelais could have written solely in Latin, the language of scholars, the language of most of what he was reading. This neoLatin, which some of the most eminent writers of the Renaissance wrote with grace, was used by Rabelais in his formal prefaces, marginal annotations in his published books, and several letters, two of which have come down to us: first, a letter addressed to the preeminent French humanist Guillaume Budé 2 See the letter dated “6 février [1547]”, oc, 1020: ‘Certainement, Mon seigneur, sy vous ne avez de moy pitié, je ne scache que doibve faire, sy non en dernier desespoir me asservir à quelqung de pardeczà avecques dommaige et perte evidente de mes estudes.’

124

menini

(4 March 1521), and a letter sent to Erasmus (30 November 1532), the tutelary figure among European scholars. In 1533 Rabelais edited the Letters and the Miscellanies by Angelo Poliziano,3 and never lost his interest in the linguistic and stylistic inquiries of his age relating to the purity and the splendor of the Latin language, to its elegantiæ. In the debates on Ciceronianism reignited by Étienne Dolet in France, there is no doubt that his sympathies lay with an eclecticism represented by Politian and Erasmus. Rabelais’s invention of a brand of French informed by all writers and all manners of speaking surely drew inspiration from these Europe-wide debates on which language should be written and spoken: should it be this inherited Latin, a legacy that the educated were increasingly wont to stuff full of Greek, and more rarely of Hebrew? Rabelais modelled his overabundant French on this enriched form of Latin, which was open and capable of absorbing difference—on this language which was the host of Western culture. But, from the 1520s on, Rabelais, the lowly and unknown Franciscan monk from Poitou, embarked on the discovery of a language in which the humanists rightly identified the root of European thought and literature. It was the beginning of an intellectual adventure that would only come to an end with the death of Rabelais. The language of Plato, for Gargantua as for Rabelais, was one “without which it is shameful for a man to call himself learned” (P, viii; cw 160): it was the idiom of the educated, which sometimes could serve to disguise a secret, whether one of erudition or of religion. Ardent defenders of the Latin Vulgate would argue that Græce est, non legitur (it is Greek, thus unreadable); Hellenists were quickly accused of heresy (Cave a Græcis, ne fias hereticus: Beware of the Greeks lest you become a heretic); but Erasmus reedited and retranslated the New Testament from the original Greek (1516). It was in this atmosphere of ecclesiastical suspicion and pioneering philology that Rabelais made his choice: the ‘Greek truth’ (veritas græca), whether of the Bible or of pagan authors. From the lost translations of his ‘adolescence’ (see infra) to the rereading of the original version of Plutarch’s Moralia in preparation for writing the Quart livre, and along the way his two editions of Hippocrates (1532 and 1537), Rabelais would never cease using Greek, the vehicle of so many masterpieces in addition to being the incomparable idiom of the New Testament. For, while Rabelais, like the other scholars of his time, lived and breathed Latin, early on it was Greek that particularly drew his attention, as he followed in the footsteps of Guillaume Budé and Erasmus. In reality, knowledge

3 Angeli Politiani Opera. Quorum Primus hic tomus complectitur Epistolarum libros xii. Miscellaneorum Centuriam i. Omnia jam recens a mendis repurgata (Lyon: 1533).

greco-roman tradition and reception

125

of Greek and its true voice was what distinguished the educated man from the true scholar in the first half of the 16th century. Pantagruel and Gargantua were exact contemporaries of De philologia (1532) and De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum (1535) by Budé; in the writings of Budé, the great French Hellenist, hellenismus gradually replaced philologia, with which it appeared to be perfectly synonymous. Gargantua insists on this point in his letter, which in many ways misleadingly resembles a confession by the author: like Rabelais, the giant did not neglect Greek as the severe Cato had done in his youth; like Rabelais, he was particularly fond of Greek prose writers such as Plutarch, Plato, Pausanias, and Athenaeus. This quartet of authors, who would never fall out of favor with Rabelais, has no equivalent in the Roman world, at least in this letter-manifesto (that unsurprisingly adds the Greek doctors and the New Testament), which is key to understanding the fictional work as a whole. This goes to show the extent to which Rabelais’s taste for and interest in the world of the Greeks, with its aggregated experience and knowledge, guided his choices of what to read and write. Thus, we constantly catch Rabelais, throughout his life as a philologist and rewriter, on the lookout for Latin and neo-Latin works capable of digesting, commenting, augmenting, and transmitting the enormous legacy of the Greeks. Beyond the Greek texts themselves, Pliny’s encyclopedia was always on his desk,4 and that is no surprise. The great studies by Aulus Gellius and Macrobius—two authors Rabelais certainly reedited for the publisher Sébastien Gryphe, in 1537 and 1538 respectively—were enduring resources for him, whether on questions of lexicography, doxography, history, or philosophy. As for compilations made in his day such as the Attic Nights (Noctes Atticæ) by Gellius, which used a ‘haphazard order’ (ordo fortuitus) and which the Renaissance so delighted in, Rabelais seems to have neglected none of them: in Crinito, Budé, Erasmus, Ravisius Textor, Leonico Tomeo, Cælius Rhodiginus, Celio Calcagnini, Alessandro d’Alessandri, his friend André Tiraqueau, and many others, he found both rare and hackneyed loci from a Greco-Roman antiquity that had been broken up into quotations, extracts, fragments, and allusions. These secondary collections of ‘readings’ or ‘ancient lessons’ (antiquæ lectiones) supplemented his study of the primary authors and brought Rabelais the scholar back to the original sources; they often played a crucial, initiating role in Rabelais’s process of rewriting.

4 A study revisiting the considerable debt of Rabelais to Pliny’s Natural History is lacking. Nevertheless, Lazare Sainéan’s now quite dated L’ Histoire naturelle et les branches connexes dans l’ œuvre de Rabelais (Paris: 1920; repr. Geneva: 1972) can be consulted on this point.

126 2

menini

Two Precocious (but Lost) Translations

But before he turned into the editor and author of fiction we now think of, Rabelais devoted himself—in his adulescentia (i.e., up until the age of thirty, it would seem)—to translating classical authors. According to two separate accounts, we know he translated, before 1524 and 1529 (respectively), the first book of Herodotus and one (or several?) work(s) by Lucian of Samosata. The 1524 edition of the treatise On Marital Laws (De legibus connubialibus) by André Tiraqueau opened with a poem made up of six Greek verses by Rabelais—proof of his mastery of the Greek language and its prosody. Later, à propos of a passage in Herodotus dealing with the wives and concubines of the Persians, Tiraqueau mentioned in passing the translation of the first book of the Histories by a certain “brother François Rabelais”: But this passage was omitted by the translator, Lorenzo Valla, as were many others in his translation: up to ten pages in the first book. I think it is because he must have obtained a mutilated manuscript. But this whole book has been elegantly translated by François Rabelais, a Franciscan, a man ahead of his time, and notwithstanding the habits of his congregation—setting aside his extremely scrupulous religious practice—someone most expert in these two languages as well as in all sorts of fields.5 According to this account, Rabelais had thus translated the first book (Clio) of Herodotus’ work more faithfully than his undoubtedly illustrious predecessor, Lorenzo Valla, whose Latin version (which dated from 1448/49 but was only published in 1474) had not been satisfactory due to the fact that the manuscript was incomplete. Tiraqueau was right to attribute these gaps to the manuscript tradition;6 the young Rabelais had certainly undertaken a meticulous comparison of the print version of the Greek text (Venice, A. Manutius, 1502) with Valla’s Latin version, using for the first time a bilingual approach he

5 “Verum is locus a Laurentio Valla Herodoti interprete omissus est: ut et alia pleraque ejusdem: li. primi ad decem ferme cartas: quod is, ut opinor, nactus sit exemplar aliquod mutilum: verum librum hunc integrum elegantissime traduxit Franciscus Rabelæsus Minoritanus vir supra ætatem: præterque ejus sodalicii morem: ne nimiam religionem dicam: utriusque linguæ: omnifariæque doctrinæ peritissimus.” Andreæ Tiraquelli […] ex commentariis in Pictonum consuetudines Sectio. De legibus connubialius et jure maritali (Paris: 1524), f. lxxiiii, v. 6 See Stefano Pagliaroli, L’Erodoto del Valla (Messina: 2006), 59–60, who provides quite a long list of the passages missing in the “exemplar mutilatum” (Vaticanus gr. 122) used by Valla.

greco-roman tradition and reception

127

would employ in similar fashion for his subsequent Greco-Latin editions of Hippocrates and Galen. A second account, just as fleeting, completes this sketch of Rabelais as translator of Greek texts. This time, the source is Pierre de Lille7 who, in his Three short calendars (Tria calendaria parva, 1529), mentions a ‘translatio’ of Lucian of Samosata by Rabelais, a monk from Maillezais. After underscoring that human knowledge was bound to provoke division and conflict, de Lille wrote: Just look at philosophers in total disagreement about the laws of nature (because they are men), on the origins of the gods moreover, and even more so when it comes to philosophical sects. This is what we see in the case of Lucian, in the translation done by Rabelais, a monk from Maillezais. For if free men, even more than free souls, disagree on the principles of knowledge, their disagreement will be greater when it comes to what follows, and a fortiori when it comes to final outcomes.8 Which work by Lucian can this be referring to? It has been doubly speculated9 that it was a translation of either Icaromenippus or Hermotimus—into Latin? (nothing is for certain)—, insofar as the passage from Pierre de Lille mentions differences of opinion among philosophers; however, the theme of disagreement among philosophers is a recurrent one in the works of Lucian. Icaromenippus is a perfect candidate, given how many echoes of the Syrian author’s celestial, “Hypernephelist” voyage (see Pantagrueline prognostication) we find in later French fiction. However, is it at all possible that Rabelais was unaware of Erasmus’s Latin translation published by Josse Bade in 1514? Probably not. Could it be that his own translation was a sort of exercise indebted to Erasmus’s work? In French, perhaps? Furthermore, might Lucian’s True Stories—a narration so often present between the lines in Rabelais’s epic work, from Pantagruel to the Quart livre—conceivably have provided fertile ground for Rabelais the translateur? A little earlier in the century, Jean Thenaud, the Franciscan (who 7 See François Secret, “Un humaniste oublié, le carme bourbonnais, Pierre de Lille,” in L’humanisme français au début de la Renaissance (Paris: 1973), 207–223, which identified for the first time a reference to a translation of Lucian made by Rabelais (p. 208 and note 27, p. 222). 8 “Videamus philosophos in nature principiis multum discordantes, quia homines, de genesi deorum magis, de sectis philosophie maxime. Ut est videre in Luciano secundum translationem Rabelesii monachi Maleacensis. Quod si in principiis doctrinarum discordant liberi homines, magis quam liberi animi, plus in medio, et maxime in fine discrepabunt.” Tria calendaria parva Petri lillani Borboniensis … (Poitiers: 1529), f. [B ii], r-v. 9 See Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagnière, Lucien de Samosate et le lucianisme en France au xvie siècle: Athéisme et polémique (Geneva: 1988), 235–236.

128

menini

would go on to be mentioned in Gargantua, xvi), had also taken upon himself to translate into French certain selected extracts from Lucian and from Erasmus. Are we to suppose that there was an early collaboration (around 1520, if not before?) between monks belonging to the same order?10 We have no choice but to speculate. Unfortunately, these two translations are lost; we do not even know whether the language into which they were translated was Latin or French, particularly in the case of Lucian. But they do reveal how far back Rabelais’s involvement with the authors of Greco-Latin antiquity goes, dating from approximately ten years before his first work of fiction. In Poitou, in the scholarly circle of André Tiraqueau at the Abbey of Fontenay-le-Comte, then in that of Geoffroy d’Estissac at Maillezais—from the Franciscans to the Benedictines—, Rabelais built up and perfected his acquaintance with the works of antiquity in the company of a close-knit group of friends. Some of these friends, moreover, attested to his mastery of the two languages, not hesitating to speak of him as a “man of great Latin and Greek learning” (Jean Bouchet). Given this bilingualism (or trilingualism, if we count French), translation was doubtless one of the best preparations at a time when the idea for his future fictional works had perhaps not even occurred to him. It is permissible to see in these juvenilia— notwithstanding their status as phantom-texts—the disappeared beginnings of a pursuit that ‘Rabelais the author’ would never abandon: that of translateur of Greco-Latin authors, guide to and interpreter of their disappeared world.

3

Rabelais’s Greco-Latin Library

If we want to get a good sense of Rabelais’s tastes in classical literature, we could do worse than to examine his library.11 The rediscovery of Greco-Latin culture was, in his case, for a long time basically a bookish affair, but that did change

10

11

A hypothesis put forward by Paul J. Smith in “Jean Thenaud and Rabelais: Some Hypotheses on the Early Reception of Erasmus in French Vernacular Literature,” in Around Erasmus: A European Humanist and His Readers, ed. K. Enenkel (Leiden: 2013), 211–236. See also Smith, “ ‘Plus feal que ne fut Appoloneus a Damis’: Rabelais et Jean Thenaud avant 1517, quelques hypothèses,” in Les Grands Jours de Rabelais en Poitou. Actes du colloque international de Poitiers, 30 août–1er septembre 2001, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget (er) 43 (Geneva: 2006), 183–194. See Seymour de Ricci, “Les autographes de Rabelais,” in Rabelais à travers les âges, ed. J. Boulenger (Paris: 1925), 216–245; Jean Porcher (ed.), Rabelais: Exposition organisée à l’ occasion du quatrième centenaire de la publication de Pantagruel (Paris: 1933); and, for the Greek works, Romain Menini, Rabelais altérateur: “Græciser en François” (Paris:

greco-roman tradition and reception

129

after 1534 when he undertook numerous trips to Italy, during which his interest for archaeology, epigraphy, and topography found expression (as attested to by the fact that Marliano’s Topography of Ancient Rome was, thanks to him, republished in Lyon12). Twenty or so books bearing Rabelais’s signature have come down to us, many of which deal with antiquity. Thanks to the difference between these signatures, it is possible to put together a rough guide to these works which lays out the (approximate) date at which he read them. Before 1525, i.e., during his time in Poitiers as a young monk, Rabelais looked at and wrote his name on—at least—the printed versions of the following works: Works and Days by Hesiod (in Greek, Parisian edition, G. de Gourmont, 1507); six ‘Moralia’ (How to Profit by One’s Enemies; On Brotherly Love; On Superstition; On Vice and Virtue; On Fortune; How a Young Man Should Read Poetry) by Plutarch (in Greek, Paris, G. de Gourmont, 1509 and [1512]); the Opera omnia of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (in Greek, Florence, F. Giunta, 1516); the works of Statius (Silvæ, Thebaid, Achilleid), preceded by a dictionary of Greek phrases (Venice, A. Manutius, 1502); the Libri de re rustica by the Latin agronomists Cato, Varro, Columella, et Palladius (Venice, A. Manutius et A. Torresanus, 1514); a Suda (in Greek, Milan, J. Bissolus and B. Mangius for D. Chalcondylas, 1499), an encyclopedic lexicon from the Byzantine period. To this small but significant sample should be added the—doubtlessly numerous—books by Rabelais’s protectors and friends (Tiraqueau and d’ Estissac, in particular), on which he could count. This was certainly the case with a particular Greek edition of Herodotus, for instance. While we are unaware of any volume by Lucian bearing Rabelais’s signature, on the other hand a copy of Lucian’s editio princeps which belonged to Pierre Lamy, his fellow Franciscan at Fontenay-le-Comte,13 has come down to us. Thanks to the correspondence

12

13

2014), 1027–1037. Credit for the recent discovery of the two Latin works by Statius and Galen (Therapeutics to Glaucon, 1538) quoted below goes to my friend Olivier Pédeflous. See Topographia antiquæ Romæ. Joanne Bartholomæo Marliano Patritio Mediolanensi autore (Lyon: 1534). This volume includes a preface by Rabelais addressed to Jean Du Bellay, in which there is mention of a compilation of notes drawn from Greek and Latin authors (“farraginem annotationum ex variis utriusque linguæ autoribus collectam”) made by Rabelais in preparation for his trip to Rome. This compilation has not been found. See Romain Menini and Olivier Pédeflous, “Les marginales de l’amitié: Pierre Lamy et

130

menini

between Lamy and Guillaume Budé, we are also aware that Lamy and Rabelais experienced some difficulties with the ecclesiastical authorities at the PuySaint-Martin monastery precisely because of their Greek books; initially confiscated from the two men, the books were returned thanks to the intercession of the great Budé. Among these books was perhaps the book by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, an early sign of the author’s taste for a Christian Neoplatonism along the lines set forth by Marsilio Ficino or Pico della Mirandola (mentioned in a handwritten note on one of the flyleaves in the Pseudo-Dionysius). And finally, a late account, dating from the 18th century, mentions an Erasmian edition of the New Testament (Haguenau, T. Anshelm, 1521) embellished by Rabelais’s signature, but this book has disappeared without a trace. The influence of these annotated works should not be overlooked: on Medamothi (ql, ii), the narrator would still recall, for instance, the Achilleid by Publius Papinius Statius. Around 1530, when Rabelais was a medical student, he annotated the following ancient works, which went beyond questions of interest to a doctor: – the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo (in Greek and Latin, Paris, P. Vidoue for C. Resch, 1521); – bound with the previous volume, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates (in Greek, Haguenau, J. Secer, [1527]); – the Moralia omnia by Plutarch (in Greek, Venice, A. Manutius and A. Asulanus, 1509); – the dialogues of Plato (in Greek, Venice, Heirs of A. Manutius and A. Torresanus, 1513); – the complete works of Galen (in Greek, Venice, A. Manutius and A. Torresanus, 1525); – De suffruticibus herbisque ac frugibus libri quattuor, i.e., books vi to ix of the Historia plantarum by Theophrastes (in Latin translation only, Strasbourg, H. Sybold, [1530]); – the treatise On Airs, Waters and Places by Hippocrates (in Greek and Latin, Basel, héritiers de J. Froben 1529); – the sixth book of Epidemics by Hippocrates (in Greek and Latin, Haguenau, J. Secer, 1532). The significant presence of Hippocrates and Galen is hardly surprising: following the classes he taught on the Aphorisms of the former and the latter’s Art of Medicine at the University of Montpellier in the spring of 1531, Rabelais would

Nicolas Bérauld lecteurs de Lucien de Samosate (BnF Rés. Z. 247),” bhr 74.1 (2012): 35– 70.

greco-roman tradition and reception

131

go on to publish Selected Works by Hippocrates and Galen,14 in which he brought together Latin translations of both works, as well as of Hippocrates’ Book of Prognostics, On Regimen in Acute Diseases, and On the Nature of Man, which were followed by the Greek text of Aphorisms. In 1537, this would be followed by an edition of the recently rediscovered Greek text of Prognostics.15 The Aldine edition of Galen, a vast monument in five tomes, is particularly noteworthy: the copy which has come down to us with four signatures (on the first four tomes) has been abundantly annotated—which is quite rare in the case of Rabelais. The margins of this edition of Galen provide the most important sample of Rabelais’s handwritten remarks; they give us an insight into his high level of expertise in medical matters, with each page demonstrating that his knowledge of that art was based on an impeccable mastery of Greek and Latin. The names of Horapollo, Plato, and Plutarch fill out this medical library. One need only think of the image (or medallion) that the young Gargantua wears on his hat (G, viii): side by side, embellished by a quotation from Saint Paul, we find a dramatic re-enactment of a scene from Plato’s Banquet and the secret insertion of a “hieroglyph” by Horapollo.16 Rabelais—who was an avid reader of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499)—would later display his interest in the Egyptian “sacres scriptures” in the Quart livre in 1552. As for Plato, he is the author most frequently mentioned by name in Rabelais’s fiction; the Banquet and the Timæus seem to be the “beaulx dialogues” that he knew best. (He does mention others, including Gorgias, Euthydemus, and Cratylus). In a letter to Antoine Hullot from March 1542, Rabelais makes plain his intention to reread Plato, asking that their common friend “return the copy of Plato, which he had lent him” (cw, 780)—proof, if any were needed, of the frequency with which he returned to the Socratic dialogues. Finally, here are some of the ancient works that Rabelais read during the final years of his life, at a time when the Tiers and Quart livres were beginning to take shape: – Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon (solely in Latin translation, with the comments of the translator Martin Akakia, Paris, S. de Colines, 1538); – The eleven comedies of Aristophanes (solely in Latin translation, Basel, A. Cratander, 1539);

14

15 16

Hippocratis ac Galeni libri aliquot, ex recognitione Francisci Rabelæsi, medici omnibus numeris absolutissimi: quorum elenchum sequens pagella incabit (Lyon: 1532), with an epistle dedicated to Geoffroy d’ Estissac. See Claude La Charité, Rabelais éditeur du Pronostic: “La voix véritable d’Hippocrate” (Paris: forthcoming). See Menini, Rabelais et l’ intertexte platonicien, (er) 47 (Geneva: 2009), 155 sqq.

132

menini

– The commentaries of Theophylact of Ohrid (11th century) on the Epistles of Saint Paul (in Latin translation, Paris, P. Vidoue for J. Petit, 1539); – The complete Moralia by Plutarch (in Greek, Basel, J. Froben and N. Episcopius, 1542). After being located in the 19th century, the Theophylact is now lost. While virtually free of annotations (with the notable exception of the signature), the presence of Aristophanes is a compelling argument for the need to explore the links between Rabelais’s mockery and the comedy of his Greek forebear, whom he mentions in the Cinquiesme livre (xxi).17 As soon as he began learning Greek, it is likely that Rabelais came across the latter’s Plutus which he would go on to quote on several occasions (in the letter to Budé, in the margins of the 1509 edition of Plutarch, in the dedication from the Book of Prognostics, and in the prologue to the Quart livre); it was a seminal and enjoyable text that was often set for budding Hellenists to read. As for the episode of the Ringing Island (which would only appear in 1562), before it turned up at the beginning of the 1564 edition of the Cinquiesme livre, everything suggests that it is a rehashing, in French, of the ornithological satire of Aristophanes’ The Birds. But it is this final work by Plutarch belonging to Rabelais that, of all the volumes in his library, provides us with the most information on the genesis of his fiction. As can be seen from this review of his library, the Moralia accompanied Rabelais throughout his life, from his days learning Greek in the Poitou region to the fictional works of his mature years: there are some four works to be taken into account, making Plutarch the best represented author—by far. While the Greek Moralia, which he read around 1520, first as separate booklets, then in the Aldes edition (around 1530?), contain some interesting marginalia,18 it is in the margins of the Basel edition of 1542 that appear several short notes, which shed crucial light on the writing of the Tiers, Quart, and even the Cinquiesme livre.19 Here we discover Rabelais the Hellenist going back to the original text of several treatises or dialogues unavailable in Latin at the time—sometimes via secondary compilations—in order to retrieve a name, an episode, or a curious detail, which he would go on to refer to, rewrite, dramatize, or parody in his French fiction. 17

18

19

See, in particular, Roy Rosenstein, “ ‘Aristophanes le Quintessential’ et Rabelais ‘qui [le] fait renaistre’,” in Le Cinquiesme livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone, (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 341–356. On these three copies mentioned above, see Abel Lefranc, “Deux ‘Plutarque’ inconnus de la bibliothèque de Rabelais,” L’ Amateur d’autographes 34.6 (1901): 113–128; and PierrePaul Plan, “Rabelais et les ‘moraulx de Plutarche’: À propos d’un ex-libris,” Mélanges d’ archéologie et d’ histoire 26 (1906): 195–249. See Menini, Rabelais altérateur.

greco-roman tradition and reception

133

Examining Rabelais’s library, in the partial form in which it has come down to us, thus gives us access to precious information. While it contains ‘gaps,’ of course, which are due to the sometimes random fashion in which classical works have been passed down over time—whatever happened to, for instance, Rabelais’s Lucian? his Atheneus? his Pausanias? his Pliny? his Solinus? his Dioscorides? his editions of the Latin and Greek comics and satirical authors? etc.—, it reveals in particular how important Greek authors were to him, as well as how determined he was to read works as much as possible in their original language.

4

Rabelais, Manuscript Hunter?

To this sample of printed books can be added the possibility that he consulted some of the numerous manuscripts that were circulating among Italian and French scholars. To our knowledge, Rabelais only signed two tiny Greek manuscripts of interest mainly to booklovers: the prolegomena to the commentary on Hesiodus by “Proclus” (in reality, by Tzetzes); and a brief extract from the chronicle written by the Byzantine historian George Kedrenos (or Cedrenus). But we also know that he was a regular participant in bishop Guillaume Pellicier’s circle, who was always on the lookout for manuscripts, for instance that of Apicius, which he discovered in Montpellier in the company of Alban Thorer in 1529,20 or of other Greek authors like Galen, gathered and collated in Italy with “Maître Martin” (perhaps the doctor Martin Akakia mentioned above).21 Rabelais was around at a time when the royal library in Fontainebleau was being considerably enriched, especially in the 1540s; he cannot have been unacquainted—the world of antiquaries and Hellenists was a very small one—with certain of the main people involved in these acquisitions,

20

21

See Mireille Huchon, “Apicius restauré, Rabelais sustenté,” in Stylus: La parole dans ses formes. Mélanges en l’ honneur du professeur Jacqueline Dangel, eds. M. Baratin, C. Lévy, R. Utard, and A. Videau (Paris: 2011), 521–533. Indeed, Pellicier wrote the following to Rabelais in letters dating from 1540 et 1541: “Me Martin et moy avecques aultres collateurs sommes tous les jours aprez à rescrutier livres grecz et mesmement des œuvres de Gallien [sic], les meilleurs comme feray entendre.” (17 octobre 1540); and later: “Je suys tousjours aprez à faire transcripre livres grecz et continueray pendant que j’ en trouveray qui en soyent dignes, de sorte que j’espere en faire une aussi bonne provision que nul de mes predecesseurs, qui ay testé ici par cy-devant, aydant le Createur.” (20 mars 1541). Pellicier’s letters to Rabelais have been transcribed by Richard Cooper, Rabelais et l’ Italie, (er) 24 (Geneva: 1991), texts vii to ix.

134

menini

which were the result of purchases or the copying of material found on the Italian peninsula. Thanks to his position in the service of cardinal Du Bellay and his long presence in large Italian cities, Rabelais witnessed—and perhaps played a vital role in—these exchanges (and, occasionally, repatriations) of cultural artefacts, which was then one of the prerogatives of emissaries and other French diplomats in Italy. As early as in 1532, Rabelais mentioned in his preface to his edition of Hippocrates and Galen an “exemplar” of the Greek text which had allowed him to hunt down the mistranslations, omissions, and interpolations of the Latin translators. Critical consensus long believed this text to be a manuscript, given the mention of its “very great age” (vetustissimum) by Rabelais, but no one has ever been able to identify the source in question. Study of the Greek variants as well as the textual notes added by Rabelais22 have not yet confirmed that he did have recourse to such a manuscript: it would appear that Rabelais based his work largely on the two Aldine editions of Hippocrates et of Galen (1525 and 1526).

5

Antiquity in the Present: Rabelais and Contemporary Developments in Philology

Without necessarily rejecting the hypothesis of a Rabelais assiduously reading manuscripts, we are obliged to acknowledge that the classical contributions to his work (whether from philology or from fiction) more often than not come from books that had been through the printing press. Never tiring of consulting ‘printed works now in use, so elegant and so correct, discovered in my time by divine inspiration’ (P, viii), Rabelais was above all else a man of the printed word.23 His work as editor and corrector for the publisher Sébastien Gryphe in the 1530s doubtless goes a long way in explaining this: Gryphe’s catalogue was essentially made up of Latin classics (or Greek classics in Latin translation) and neo-Latin works (Erasmus, Melanchthon, etc.) utterly infused with antiquity. We have already mentioned the editions of Hippocrates and Galen that we owe to Rabelais’s industry, as well as the role he probably played in Gryphe’s re-

22

23

See La Charité, Rabelais éditeur du Pronostic, and his “Rabelais traducteur d’Hippocrate: La restitution ‘ex Græco codice’ de passages du Pronostic et du Régime dans les maladies aiguës omis par Guillaume Cop,” in Paroles dégelées: Propos de l’Atelier xvie siècle, eds. T. Le Flanchec, V. Montagne, A. Réach-Ngô, M.-C. Thomine, and T. Tran (Paris: 2016), 311–354. See Menini, “Rabelais, homme d’ atelier(s),” in Paroles dégelées, 451–470.

greco-roman tradition and reception

135

editions of Aulus Gellius24 (1537) and Macrobius25 (1538); the involvement of Rabelais in the re-edition of other minor classical authors is highly probable, and the question remains open regarding those works where his contribution may have remained incognito. It has recently been shown that Rabelais had applied his editorial stamp (as well as his ortho-typographical methods) to an anonymous French-language publication of a free adaptation of the pseudoHomeric Batrachomyomachia, which was combined with translations of certain passages from Aelian’s Historia animalium and fables by Aesop featuring rats and frogs.26 This venture is striking by its novelty: until then, no one had offered the French reading public the pleasures of the parodic micro-epic. This experience of the publishing trade perhaps explains in part a characteristic feature of Rabelais’s rewriting of the Ancients: an ability to faithfully convey a sense—albeit with a certain critical distance—of contemporary debates on this or that aspect of ancient culture. In Rabelais’s writings, these re-encounters with antiquity thus often glow with an ‘absolutely modern’ and burning topicality. In this respect, Rabelais the fiction writer seems utterly humanist. In Pantagruel, we can hear echoes of French debates (involving partisans of the mos gallicus, in the tradition of Budé) about the reception and comprehension of the founding works of Roman law, whose splendid texture appears to have been “embroidered with shit” by medieval commentators, in the words of the giant in Accursius’ commentaries on the Pandectes (ch. v), because these imbeciles “had no knowledge of any language either Greek or Latin, but only Gothic and barbarian” (ch. x). Similarly, a chapter in the Cinquiesme livre offers a glimpse of the Ancients’ dispute, rekindled by humanists, over the meaning of the Aristotelian term “entéléchie” (ἐντελέχεια, sometimes confused, since the time of Cicero, with ἐνδελέχεια), which becomes in Rabelais’s scheme the name of a queen in the kingdom of Quinte-Essence:

24 25 26

See Menini, “Rabelais et Aulu Gelle, de l’ atelier de Gryphe aux fèves en gousse.” er 57 (2019), 19–50. See Huchon, “Rabelais éditeur et auteur chez Gryphe,” in Quid novi? Sébastien Gryphe à l’ occasion du 450e anniversaire de sa mort, ed. R. Mouren (Lyon: 2008), 201–218. See Menini and Pédeflous, “Dans l’ atelier de François Juste: Rabelais passeur de la Batrachomyomachie,” in Passeurs de textes ii: Gens du livre et gens de lettres à la Renaissance, eds. C. Bénévent, I. Diu and C. Lastraioli (Turnhout: 2014), 98–117; Menini and Pédeflous, “ ‘Æsope le François’: Autour de dix-sept fables ésopiques éditées par Rabelais,” in Séductions de la fable, eds. F. Calas and N. Viet (Paris: 2015), 193–222.

136

menini

It was certainly necessary for Cicero to give up his Republic to meddle in it, and Diogenes Laertius, and Theodorus Gaza, Argyropylos [sic] and Bessarion, and Politian, and Budé, and Lascaris, and all those wise fool devils, whose number would not have been big enough if it had not been recently augmented by Scaliger, Bigot, Chambrier, François Fleury, and I don’t know what other fly-blown young jerks.27 cw, 649

In the wake of these scholars, Rabelais co-opts, with great comic panache, the lexicographical analysis of this Aristotelian term. The dedicatory epistle to the Quart livre picked up on the recent translation, by Jean Vassès, of the commentary by Galen on the three books of Hippocrates’ Epidemics (Paris, C. Wechel, 1546—like the Tiers livre); in it, Rabelais addresses, with a sharp sense of connivance, Cardinal Odet de Châtillon, the very man to whom Vassès’s work had already been dedicated.28 On several occasions, the Fourth Book from 1552 repeats antiquarian details that Jean Brodeau, Hellenist, editor-commentator of classic Greek epigrams from the Greek, and native of Tours, had just barely put into the public domain.29 It would be easy to cite multiple examples of passages where Rabelais’s fiction seems to be reacting immediately to contemporary developments—which were also random publishing phenomena—in the field of classical studies. Finally, mention should be made of the Platonic (or Neoplatonic) mannerisms that the narrator and characters of the Tiers livre cannot seem to resist, with all their talk of ‘ideas,’ demons (whether Socratic or otherwise), soul of the world, harmony of spheres, ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘poetic fury’: in 1546, Rabelais upped the parodic stakes, poking fun at the ‘Platonic’ fashion which, in imitation of Italy, had just taken hold at the court of Francs i and at the spiritual ‘alliances’ that were cultivated there.30 The authority con27

28 29

30

“Il estoit bien besoin, que Ciceron abandonnast sa Republique, pour s’en empescher, et Diogenes Laertius, et Theodorus Gaza, et Argyropile, et Bessarion, et Politian, et Budé, et Lascaris, et tous les diables de sages fols: le nombre desquels n’estoit assez grand, s’il n’eust esté recentement accreu par Scaliger, Brigot, Chambrier, François Fleury, et ne sçay quels autres tels jeunes haires escmouchetez.” (cl, xviii, 766–767) See La Charité, “Rabelais lecteur d’ Hippocrate dans le Quart livre,” in Langue et sens du Quart Livre, ed. F. Giacone (Paris: 2012), 233–268. See Raphaël Cappellen, “Rabelais lecteur des Epigrammatum graecorum libri vii commentés par Jean Brodeau (1549),” in Les Labyrinthes de l’esprit, eds. R. Gorris-Camos and A. Vanautgaerden (Geneva: 2015), 105–119. See Robert Marichal, “L’attitude de Rabelais devant le néoplatonisme et l’italianisme (Quart Livre, chap. ix à xi),” in François Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort. 1553–1953 (Geneva: 1953), 181–209; and Menini, Rabelais et l’intertexte platonicien, 90 sqq.

greco-roman tradition and reception

137

ferred by antiquity was never so necessary; rarely had one mocked with as much justification its deformation by high society.

6

Pantagruel’s Gest, a Parade of Classical Genres

From Pantagruel to the Quart livre, Rabelais seems to have tried his hand at all the literary genres that emerged from classical antiquity. While the canvas of the first two works printed in Gothic typeface, Pantagruel et Gargantua, mainly borrowed from genres representative of a medieval period on the wane (the knightly romance and the ‘chronicle’), there is already some remarkable evidence of Rabelais’s interest in classical genres, which would reach its paroxysm in the Tiers and the Quart livres. The parody of fraudulent historiography, the constant play on truth and lies which started in Pantagruel must surely be related to Rabelais’s detailed knowledge of Lucian of Samosata, and in particular his True Stories. At the outset of this piece of fiction, in which fantasy and implausibility are constantly used to take shots at supposedly serious models of actual historiography and travel literature, the narrator promises to be truthful on one single point, i.e., his intention to lie on every page of his literary lark. From the prologue of Pantagruel to chapter xxxviii of the Quart livre, “Comment les Andouilles ne sont à mespriser entre les humains” (“How Chitterlings are not to be Slighted by Men”), Rabelais constantly repeats this type of declaration of unreliability, which causes veracity to wobble on its Lucianesque pedestal. This is because, as a young translator of Herodotus and Lucian, Rabelais had come to appreciate the subtlety of Lucian’s approach, especially with regard to Herodotus’ narratives, which are parodied throughout his work. Pantagruel and Gargantua adapt this use of the parodic counterpoint, applying it to contemporary genres: the chanson de geste, ‘the old’ knightly romance, genealogies, ‘chronicles,’ regional and national ‘annales.’ While his friend Jean Bouchet, historiographer, chronicler, and genealogist, was a bit like a modern-day Herodotus, Rabelais could be said to fit the description of a ‘French Lucian.’ All the way through his pseudo-chronicle, “celui qui feint si bien le Nez de Lucian” (“he who wears so well Lucian’s nose,” as Joachim Du Bellay would refer to Rabelais), has no compunction about extending his intertextual references to authors who gave in to the passion for curiosa, to the love for legend, or to the pleasure of wonders, whether they belonged to the classical or modern period. In the episode of the land of Satin, written before 1546 but only published in 1564, found in the posthumous Cinquiesme livre, “Herodote, Pline, Solin, Berose, Philostrate, Mela, Strabo, et tant d’autres antiques” are met by the Pantagruelists in the “escole

138

menini

de tesmoignerie” (“the School for Witnessing”) run by “Ouy-dire” (“Hearsay”) (ch. xxx): in a style redolent of Lucian, Rabelais pokes fun at the confidence with which these ancient liars—for whom he never disguised his taste and his curiosity31—lent credence, one after another, more or less, to erroneous legends. The same sort of observation also holds for the heroicomic vein in Rabelais’s fictional work: from 1532 to 1552, the epic register is in each book (perhaps a little less so in the Tiers livre in 1546) twisted out of shape with abandon, with Rabelais not being shy about borrowing from the techniques of classical texts for his own parodic ends. From the pseudo-Iliadic battle scenes in Pantagruel, as well as the Odyssean encounters32 in the same work (the first in the series), to the voyage of no return in what amounts to a counter-Odyssey, in the Quart livre, which also includes battle scenes (whose tone is reminiscent of the ancient Batrachomyomachy), all the necessary elements are present to confer on Rabelais’s fiction the status—albeit in pastiche mode—of “Grand Œuvre” (Great Work) (in French and in prose) as set out by Sébillet in his discussion of the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and the Roman de la Rose in his Art poétique françois.33 Noting that the navigation in the Quart livre begins on the very day Aeneas ends his voyage and founds Rome, Michael Screech, while also emphasizing the importance of Ovid’s Festivals, has no hesitation in identifying, in the midst of all the laughter, echoes of Homer and Virgil;34 Rabelais knew Virgil’s epic extremely well, not to mention some of its most important commentators such as Macrobius and Servius,35 whose erudition enlivens the Tiers 31

32

33 34 35

See, for instance, in the case of Philostratus of Athens, author of the ‘biography’ of Apollonius of Tyana, Guy Demerson, “Apollonios de Tyane chez Rabelais: Christ dans un miroir déformant?,” in Cité des hommes, cité des dieux: Travaux sur la littérature de la Renaissance en l’ honneur de Daniel Ménager, eds. J. Céard, M.-C. Gomez-Géraud, and M. Magnien (Geneva: 2003), 503–512. For some suggestive parallels between Pantagruel and the Odyssey, see Gérard Defaux, “Une rencontre homérique: Panurge noble, pérégrin et curieux,” French Forum 6.2 (May 1981): 109–122; Defaux, Le Curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse du monde: L’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, Démosthène, Empédocle) (Lexington, KY: 1982); and Terence Cave, “Panurge and Odysseus,” in Myth and Legend in French Literature: Essays in Honour of A.J. Steele, eds. K. Aspley, D. Bellos, and P. Sharratt (London: 1982), 47–59. On Rabelais’s debt to Homer, see also Philip Ford, De Troie à Ithaque: Réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2007), 201–208. These works offer a corrective to Noémi Hepp’s hasty view that Rabelais’s knowledge of Homer seems to have been relatively limited. (“Homère en France au xvie siècle,” Atti della Academia delle Scienze di Torino, ii, Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche 90.6 (1961–1962): 389–508). Thomas Sébillet, Art poetique françoys [1548] (Paris: 1555), ii, 14, f. I8 r. See Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: 1979), 300. See in particular W.F. Smith, “Rabelais et Servius,”Revue des études rabelaisiennes 4 (1906):

greco-roman tradition and reception

139

livre, in the course of which verses are drawn from the Aeneid (or the Homeric epics) so that their meaning might be discussed (ch. x). The third instalment of the series featuring Pantagruel, published ten years after Gargantua in Roman characters by the humanist printer Chrestien Wechel, must have been a surprise for his readers, who had become accustomed to the dual canvas of pseudo-historiography and heroicomedy of the first two books. Published under the sign of the Bactrian camel—an image used by Lucian in his Prometheus in verbis to represent his work of formal hybridization—, Rabelais, following in the footsteps of Lucian (himself an imitator of Plato and Aristophanes), develops a dialogue form combining philosophy and comedy. The Tiers livre is part of the classical tradition of banquet literature, in which verb and victuals meet,36 that of Plato’s Banquet, Plutarch’s Table Talk (richly annotated in the 1542 edition already mentioned above), Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists and Macrobius’ Saturnalia. Two paradoxical elegies—a form which, in antiquity, was given elevated status—frame these pithy exchanges: first, we have a Neoplatonic demonstration of the necessity of debt; then, in conclusion, an elegy to the Pantagruelion plant in the style of the naturalist Theophrastus, Dioscorides, or Pliny the Elder. Over all these reinvented, enriched and virtually cross-bred genres, hovers the remarkable dependent shadow of Lucian of Samosata and his allusive writings. The final work, the Quart livre is the conclusion of Rabelais’s coming to terms with Lucian’s model: True Stories on this occasion offered the framework of a voyage which also included thoughts on demonology and theology borrowed from Plutarch, fables inspired by Aesop, myths rivalling those in Plato, scholarly dialogues worthy of Aulus Gellius or Athenaeus, ethnological remarks in the manner of Herodotus (whose book VI, on the Scythians, often lurks in the background), as well as comical sketches that neither Aristophanes nor Plautus would have disowned. Out of a scenario thought up by an anonymous imitator, the Disciple de Pantagruel (or Navigations de Panurge, ca. 1538)—which also lays claim to Lucian’s legacy—, Rabelais constructed a grand work in which the classical tradition could be transformed as never before; he transformed the modest lark of one of his disciples into a monumental fresco, painted with a masterful touch. This “meslange satyricque,” which reinvented classical satire,

36

349–368; and Raymond Chevallier, “Rabelais lecteur de Virgile,” Revue belge de philologie et d’ histoire 79.1 (2001): 119–126. See Michel Jeanneret, Des Mets et des mots: Banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Paris: 1987); and Jeanneret, “Parler en mangeant: Rabelais et la tradition symposiaque,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 275–281.

140

menini

in prose, as part of a piece of insular fiction where the satura of the sources is the guiding principle,37 barely pays tribute to the novel of antiquity: admittedly, there is a hint of Achilles Tatius between the lines of the Medamothi episode38 (ch. ii), but Pantagruel falls asleep over a “Greek Heliodorus” (ch. lxiii) while at the very same period Jacques Amyot had just introduced the French public to the Aethiopica (1548). Rather than a novel, the Quart livre is a sort of superfiction, or hypermyth which Rabelais himself, in the Briefve declaration attached to certain copies, likens to the “fabuleuse narration” (narratio fabulosa) defined by Macrobius as a fabula concealing under the veil of its fiction the precious lesson of the truth. The “mythologies pantagruelicques” (Ép. à Odet, 517) resemble the ‘mythical’ narrative, all the while and forever constituting their own exegesis: they are infinitely allegorical—but their altior sensus, like the safe arrival of the Thalamege, is forever consigned to an uncertain future. Erudite allusions and knowing winks to antiquarian knowledge abound in this intertextual treasure hunt in which the mysteries of the past (marvels from Egypt, aporias from Greek philosophy, fabulous creatures from the Roman world) are always presented as pure mirages on the book’s horizon.

7

Rabelais and the “Macræons”

Rabelais: a man nostalgic for ancient days, a laudator temporis acti, an idolater of antiquities? Not he. An episode from the Quart livre, one with powerful metaliterary importance, hints at the ins and outs of his relationship with the classical tradition, one in which irrepressible attraction and ironic distance coexist at all times.39 From chapters xxv to xxviii, Pantagruel and his companions make a stop on the “isles des Macræons.” Any reader familiar with classical literature (from Hesiod to Horace) recognizes in this harsh place name a deformation of “Μακάρων Νῆσοι,” these “Fortunate Isles” or “Isles of the Blessed” (insulæ fortunatæ) which the poets of old turned into the home of heroes beloved by the gods. The scholar Epistemon sums us the debased meaning of Rabelais’s version: “Macræon en Grec signifie vieillart, home qui a des ans beau-

37 38 39

See Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’Herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007). See Antoinette Huon, “Alexandrie et l’ alexandrinisme dans le Quart Livre: L’escale à Medamothi,” er 1 (1957): 98–111. Regarding this decisive episode, see Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 36 (Geneva: 1998), 25–26; and Menini, Rabelais altérateur, 343–350 and 771–780.

greco-roman tradition and reception

141

coup” (“In Greek, Macræon means old man, man who is in years advanced”) (ql, xxv). The ancient locus amœnus now gives off a musty odor; it resembles some retirement home where the “Long-Livers” (Macrobii) from Lucian, Herodotus, Pliny, or Solinus, Hyperboreans from a canonical age, are pensioned off. Among their numbers, “le vieil Macrobe”—who just happens to bear the name of the compiler of late antiquity that Rabelais knew well: Macrobius (Ambrosius Theodosius), the great collector of classical knowledge40—plays at being tourist guide to the travelers; he speaks perfect Greek and brings them to visit the fascinating ruins of a bygone world. The ancient oracles have disappeared from the archipelago, like in Plutarch, but a few inscriptions and the power of memory provide imperishable remains. With a mixture of delectation and derision, Rabelais demonstrated in this episode the impossibility of a transmission dreamed of by certain humanists of his time; in his fiction, we see the difficulties involved in the transition from the civilization of classical antiquity to the modern world, which Budé had referred to in the title of his last book as “transitus Hellenismi ad Christianismum.”41 A gulf separated his contemporaries from the Ancients he cherished and revered, sometimes as gods; Renaissance Man had thus no longer any choice but to adopt a relationship of distant sympathy with respect to these venerable authorities, while acknowledging the deformation they had suffered over time, even if it meant sometimes laughing at what had happened. Right in the middle of the 1552 work, this fantasy re-encountering of supposedly fortunate isles is seized upon to make a point: this lost world was no longer the one in which Rabelais lived, and he was also perhaps pointing out to us that his would never be ours either. One of the virtues of philology is doubtless to remind us of this point, without prohibiting us, all the same,—on the contrary—from dreaming about extinct civilizations in order to bring their best days back to life. So it goes with the inimitable banquet of the heroes of old, whose tasty leftovers remain for us to pick over.

∵ 40 41

See Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, “Macrobe et les âmes héroïques (Rabelais, Quart livre, chapitres 25 à 28),” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 11.3 (1987): 211–221. G. Budæi Parisiensis […] De Transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum, Libri tres (Paris: 1535); Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie and Daniel Franklin Penham (eds.), Le Passage de l’ Hellénisme au Christianisme (Paris: 1993). See also Nicolas Le Cadet, “L’île des Macræons, ou les ambiguïtés du transitus rabelaisien (Quart livre, chap. xxv à xxviii),”rhr 61 (2005): 51–72.

142

menini

Rabelais’s treatment of the Greco-Latin tradition was a singular one: without a hint of stiffened servility, his take on classical authors always had a re-inventive energy about it. By “reverence de l’antiquaille” the author of Gargantua (ii, 11) never meant giving in to some sort of conservative submission. Increasingly anxious, as his fictional work progressed, to transmit and revive the memory of the Ancients, Rabelais always asserted the right to choose from the auctoritates the most curious details, the funniest stories, and the most outlandish beliefs: that is why Herodotus appeals to him more than Thucydides, Suetonius more than Tacitus. From his years as a monk in the Poitou—during which his study of Greek was without doubt an intellectual turning point—to the final lines of the Quart livre, Rabelais would never tire of consulting the masterpieces of antiquity. From a study of his library and of his adaptations emerge two tutelary figures, both Greeks: Lucian of Samosata and Plutarch of Chaeronea. The rhetorical and parodic substance of the former and the rich and polymathic Platonism of the latter provided him with enduring models. The Tiers and the Quart livres can often appear, in this respect, to be an unending juxtaposition of these two bodies of work, both in terms of their tone and style. But, as far as classical literature is concerned, Rabelais would surely have been a staunch defender of the principle of eclecticism set out by Pliny the Younger (Epist., iii, v, 10): “Nullum esse librum tam malum, ut non aliqua parte prodesse queat” or, as it was translated by Tory at the beginning of his Champ fleury (1529), “il n’est si mechant Livre, qui ne puisse prouffiter en quelque chose” (“there is no book so poor as not to be useful in some respect”). As in all fields of knowledge, when it came to knowledge about Antiquity, Rabelais had an unquenchable curiosity, with a thirst for knowledge obtained from primary sources, just like Homer’s “Alibantes” (deprived of vital juices) in Pantagruel (ch. ii), which he perhaps read about in Plutarch, Galen, Eustathius of Thessalonica, or even in Cælius Rhodiginus. A mine of quotations, a fount of references and a game of allusion tag, Rabelais’s fiction is aimed at a ‘diligent reader,’ the only type capable of appreciating its never-ending game of hide-and-seek with the works of antiquity, which it encourages us to reread with ever more attention and an ever more critical eye. Rabelais set himself—in prose and in comic mode—the same challenge the poets of the Pléiade soon would: to irrigate vernacular literature with waters drawn from the fountain of youth of the Greeks and Romans. Has his ancienne renouvelée prose succeeded in meeting this challenge? It is reasonable to think so—and even to have a good laugh about it.

chapter 6

Rabelais and Eloquence Daniel Ménager

In literary studies on either side of the Atlantic, rhetoric always has a place of honor.1 This interest is so obviously justified that there is no need to linger over the matter. Still, let us note that for certain postmodern thinkers, rhetoric can be explained by a philosophical understanding of the text that owes much to Derrida, Deleuze, or Foucault. This serves to shape rhetorical studies, not necessarily a bad thing, but one which it is important to know. On the other hand, it seems that a commitment to the rhetorical examination of a work sometimes causes attention to shift from the question of eloquence. To write or to speak eloquently implies knowledge of the resources of rhetoric, but it is a matter of more than that. The end should not be taken for the means. Rabelais was devoted to the philosophy of eloquence. The study of his copia (his verbal abundance), is not likely to tell us enough about it unless we wish to treat the humanist learning of the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel as negligible, something which would not occur to anyone, not even the postmodernists. We know very little about how he learned eloquence. Rabelais’s first acquaintance with Latin and Greek authors was by reading them in secret along with his friend Pierre Lamy, in a Franciscan convent, Fontenay-le-Comte, where they were forbidden.2 We have a moving account of those years of spiritual famine in the veritable De profundis that he wrote, no doubt in 1521, to Guillaume Budé, among the most eminent scholars of the day.3 In its very awkwardness, this letter expresses all the unhappiness of the monk, no longer especially young, forced, like Erasmus before him, to live in a community which shut out intellectual curiosity or aesthetic sense. His situation changed considerably when he was accepted among the Benedictines of Maillezais in 1524. Bit by bit, the world opened up, new friendships were possible. Soon, Rabelais would have 1 Those who need to be convinced are invited to consider the number of entries under “rhetoric” in that wonderful tool, the Rabelais volume of the Bibliographie des écrivains français 32, eds. Guy Demerson and Myriam Marrache-Gouraud (Rome-Paris: 2010). 2 For general information about Rabelais’s monastic training see (still and always) Etienne Gilson, “Rabelais franciscain,” in Les idées et les lettres (Paris: 1932), 197–241; see also Mireille Huchon, Rabelais (Paris: 2011). 3 This letter was of course written in Latin. For the English translation, see cw 735–737. For French, see oc, 993–997.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_008

144

ménager

mastered Greek so well that he was able to edit Hippocrates and Galen, physicians, who knew how to write, especially in the case of the former. In 1532, when he had already made a name for himself in medical circles, he wrote Erasmus the famous letter where he says that for him, the humanist had been a veritable mother.4 Nothing can take the place of belles lettres. It seems clear that for him humanist culture was an absolute treasure, a source of living water fertilizing his religious beliefs, which can hardly be doubted, and his philosophy. For him, humanist culture was not merely a synonym of knowledge. If it cannot appeal to the heart as well as to the brain, to convince and to move, nothing of value has been accomplished. Overall, the Middle Ages preferred dialectics to eloquence.5 It can be said, putting it simply, that the Renaissance cultivated eloquence because of a conviction that man only had access to the truth by the living exercise of speech. Seen from this point of view, eloquence is something quite different from the art of fine cadences. From a theological point of view, it is also one of the ways of honoring the incarnation of God, the Word made flesh.6 Speech is also what defines man.

∵ To clarify, it might be well to return to the education of Gargantua, even if it seems that all its secrets have been revealed. In its medieval form (G 14), it leaves little space for eloquence or the beauties of language. Instead, the young giant studies ponderous works of logic, already pilloried by Erasmus, and all without any apparent order. Treatises of good manners find a place next to works of nominalist logic. Of course, when Gargantua is asked to show his father what he has learned, he is incapable of producing a single coherent sentence. The famous Thubal Holophernes has committed a double error. Not only has the promising child become “crazy, stupid, all dreamy and idiotic” (G 15, 39) [“fou, nays, tout resveux et rassoté” (p. 44)], but he is certainly incapable at this point in the story of someday becoming king. His tutor has entirely forgotten that he was to prepare the young man to be king. Humanists, however, held that there could be no king who was not acquainted with real eloquence, the kind that conquers hearts. That would still be the case in the 17th century. Epistémon changes things less than one might have hoped. The arts of the quadrivium, 4 oc, 998–999. 5 It would be desirable to express this in a more nuanced form, not possible within the limits of this chapter. Alain Michel, for example, has clearly shown that the sense of the beauty of words was not lost during what we call the Middle Ages. See La parole et la beauté (Paris: 1994). 6 See Jacques Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chez Érasme (Paris: 1980).

rabelais and eloquence

145

that is, the sciences, have pride of place. Oddly, the young giant does not seem to read the Ancient authors valued by humanism, those who teach how to think and how to speak at the same time. However, eloquence does appear in this education, although rather indirectly. When it was rainy, Rabelais explains, Gargantua and his tutor “went to hear public readings, solemn acts, rehearsals, declamations, the pleading of the nice lawyers, the sermons of the Evangelical preachers” (cw 60).7 An anodyne but essential sentence: it is eloquence that brings together lawyers, law students, and preachers. They had all learned the art of convincing and persuading, and they attempted to put it into practice. Rabelais was writing a novel. He needed characters to represent his ideas. In this case, they are Janotus de Bragmardo and Eudemon. Janotus is remembered because he was grotesque. It is not possible to imagine a more ridiculous Latin-filled discourse than that which he addresses to Gargantua to demand the return of the bells that the giant had just playfully stolen (G 19).8 One detail should be recalled: Janotus is not an orator, he is a “sophist,” that is, as Rabelais uses the word, a theologian.9 He has not learned how to speak in public, so his failure is not a failure of eloquence. Eudemon, the young page who appears in chapter 15, appeals to all at first sight. Elegant, well-coiffed, up to date, he is really, as “Don Philip Des Marais” (cw 39 [oc 44]) puts it, a young man of the present day. When his master asks him to address a greeting to young Gargantua, he carries this out gracefully, “cap in hand, open face, red mouth, eyes steadfast” (cw 39) [“le bonnet au poing, la face ouverte, la bouche vermeille, les yeux asseurez” (oc 44)]. His oral presentation is so convincing that Rabelais, or rather his comic prankster double, compares him to the most famous orators of antiquity. His greeting is in the realm of epidictic eloquence, the art of praise and blame. However, in this case, there is nothing about Gargantua deserving of praise, neither his good manners nor his knowledge, making Eudemon a liar. He has kept only the topoi of real eloquence, and the elegant gestures that should accompany such discourse, known as “oratory gestures.” Eudemon is therefore not a convincing image of the person likely to represent humanism in opposition to the medieval Janotus.10

7 8 9 10

[Ils] “alloient ouïr les leçons publiques, les actes solennels, répétitions, les déclamations, les playdoiez des gentilz advocats et concions des prescheurs evangeliques.” (G 24, 71). His oratorical presentation, although deplorable from a humanist perspective, might yet be considered a success in that it provokes laughter. G 17, 49. On Rabelais’s use of this word, see Gérard Defaux, Pantagruel et les sophistes: Contribution à l’ histoire de l’ humanisme chrétien au xvie siècle (The Hague: 1973). Eudemon represents courtly culture, of which he seems a kind of caricature, being so insignificant. See François Rabelais (Bibliographie des écrivains français), nº 2209.

146

ménager

There is good reason to prefer Panurge and Frère Jean to him, two figures who could not be more different but who lead us to discover a much more living face of eloquence. They have in common that they are not the product of the schools. Panurge, whose origins are unknown, learned how to speak in taverns and on the road. Frère Jean, an untrained monk who brays his way through his breviary, knows nothing of the great orators of antiquity. Still, without these two, Rabelais work would not exist. At the same time, they are not exemplary. When Pantagruel meets Panurge, he has no notion of eloquence.11 How could he be preoccupied with it when (as is not sufficiently remarked) the subject is not at the core of his father Gargantua’s interests in the great letter he writes to his son (P 8). Eloquence again takes on a ridiculous face in the person of the Limousin student whom the giant meets, and who shows himself incapable of speaking French (P 6). We should not be misled here: Pantagruel does not reproach him for speaking incomprehensibly. Otherwise, we would not understand his fascination with the multiple jargons of Panurge whom he meets a bit later. The difference between Panurge and the Limousin student is that the latter is transparent. Panurge, on the other hand, appears at first glance to be opaque, mysterious. If this idea is correct, it follows that real speech does not reveal, it hides as much as it shows. And it goes much further than dialectical demonstrations inherited from the Middle Ages which Pantagruel uses in an attempt to impress intellectually in the next chapter. Panurge himself is responsible for showing how useless they are when, in the place of his new friend, he confronts the Englishman Thaumaste’s strange project of a debate by signs (P 18). Rabelais seems to be saying that the time for debates, whether by words or by gestures is now past. Are we to believe Panurge? His babble is impressive, but a degree of acquaintance with devils is not in his favor. If he went no further than to invent the story of his life, as adventure-filled as a hero of the picaresque soon to be born in Spain, we could forgive him. What seems unreasonable (but is reason what rules in this text?) are his oratorical performances, becoming more and more frequent as the story goes on, and more and more improbable. One of the best known, in the Third Book, is of course his praise of debts (tl 2–5).12 It should be recalled on this subject that at the start, this is the only way he finds to plead his case, having spent all the money that Pantagruel gave him. Three chapters of a stunning vivacity are coolly received by Pantagruel: “I understand […] and you 11

12

The bibliography concerning Panurge is enormous; for the present purposes, see the work of Defaux cited in note 10, and Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, “Hors toute intimidation”: Panurge et la parole singulière, (er) 41 (Geneva: 2003). On the philosophical sources of this praise of debts, see Mireille Huchon’s notes, oc, 1373ff.

rabelais and eloquence

147

seem to me a good advocate and devoted to your cause” (tl 5, 273) [“J’ entends […] et me semblez bon topicqueur et affecté à vostre cause” (p. 367)]. The topos, always part of rhetoric, supplies the orator with arguments and commonplaces. There is nothing shocking in Panurge’s use of them. Nor should we reproach him for defending himself vigorously. Pantagruel’s criticism is better defined a few sentences further on: “You’re using on me here beautiful representations and descriptions” [“Vous usez icy de belles graphides et diatyposes” (oc 367)]. The language is technical (this is not reflected in Frame’s English translation). “Graphides” are images, which in fact Panurge uses frequently. The other term, “diatyposes,” is a more general reference to rhetorical figures. How could an orator be blamed for using them? Especially when (as Pantagruel admits) they are pleasurable? All of which is to say that it is possible to please the public, or a reader, while arguing for a dubious proposition. That is just what troubled Plato, who did not like orators. But how do we know that Panurge is defending a losing proposition, which would place his discourse in the genre of paradoxical praise, of which the most famous at that time was of course Erasmus’s Praise of Folly? We know that Erasmus went further. It is one thing to praise quartain fevers, baldness or even flies, quite another to invite reflection, to suggest (as Erasmus does), that sometimes a degree of madness is preferable to reason or, following Panurge’s example, that the world would collapse if it ceased depending on economic and financial exchange.13 We might speak here of heuristic praise: like Montaigne later, as Rabelais explores the paths of truth, any subject can serve this purpose. Panurge, never at a loss for inventions, will be less convincing when he argues that the “shit” with which he is soiled as a consequence of his fear, is really “Hibernian saffron” (ql 67, 592) [“sapphran d’ Hibernie” (oc 701)]. The other character marked by natural eloquence is Frère Jean. He does not share Panurge’s taste for long speeches. Although he is a monk, he has no education. He shares a soldier’s taste for using few words, as can be seen when the vineyard of Seuillé is attacked, or during the tempest. He is a loudmouth, loves swearing, which he terms “colors of Ciceronian rhetoric” (G 39, 92) [“couleurs de rhetorique Cicéroniane” (oc 109)]. In his own way, he is a good fellow, as the page Eudemon, who is so different, learns to his surprise. As courageous as Panurge is cowardly, he cannot do without his company. The whole Third Book relies on their complicity and their amazing verbal ingenuity, which sometimes reaches the level of pure poetry as in the monk’s gorgeous comparison between 13

These are among the examples of parodic praise cited by Erasmus in the preface “To his friend Thomas More,” at the start of the Praise of Folly. Erasmus, Praise of Folly, ed. A.H.T. Levi (London: 1993), 5.

148

ménager

Panurge’s head and a globe where three continents are visible: a brilliant new application of the humanist comparison of macrocosm and microcosm (tl 28).14 Without the two of them, let us admit it would be a dull book. They are also close to Alcofribas Nasier, anagram of François Rabelais, and the form with which he signed his first two novels. Panurge is in many ways a dubious individual, as is Alcofribas. What they share is an unquestionable taste for hoax and a real devotion to verbal invention. Alcofribas is the king of smooth talkers. The whole of the prologue to Pantagruel (the first to be written) has but a single aim: to persuade readers that the novel they now hold in their hands has unequaled virtues, already present in the Grandes et inestimables Chroniques de l’enorme geant Gargantua; a work to be read immediately, a work capable of curing a tooth ache by placing the book on the painful spot, capable of soothing those with the pox at the most painful moment of their treatment. “Find me a book, in whatever language, whatever faculty and area it may be, that has such virtues properties, and prerogatives, and I’ll pay for a pint of tripes” (P prol., 134).15 A prologue is not a preface. It was expected that in the latter, the author presenting an overview, seek to dispose his readers in favor of the work (captatio benevolentiae). Rabelais’s prologues plunge readers directly into the work they are about to read.16 Readers are forced to dive directly into the work without an overview, with no means of taking their bearings. It seems that Rabelais’s second prologue (to Gargantua) is much less dependent on the carnival repertory.17 We find ourselves, at least at the start, in the much more respectable company of Socrates and Plato, figures revered by humanism. Soon enough, there is a second subject of praise, a dog gnawing on a marrow bone. “You were able to note with what devotion he watches it, with what care he guards it, with what fervor he holds it, with what prudence he starts on it, with what affection he breaks it, with what diligence he sucks it” (G, 4).18 All that for a bit of marrow. There is nothing inopportune in this praise

14 15 16 17

18

See Frank Lestringant’s contribution to this volume. “Trouvez moy livre en quelque langue, en quelque faculté et science que ce soit, qui ayt telles vertus, proprietés, et prerogatives, et je poieray chopine de trippes” (P, 214). There are innumerable studies of the rhetoric of Rabelais’s prologues. See the references (no fewer than 110) in François Rabelais (Bibliographie des écrivains français). This is the most difficult of all. For a long time, it was believed that this prologue invited the reader to seek the hidden sense of his work. More recently, it is read differently. It may be that Rabelais is suggesting above all a free and flexible reading, which is quite another thing. “Vous avez pu noter de quelle devotion il le guette: de quel soing il le guarde: de quel ferveur il le tient, de quelle prudence il l’ entomme; de quelle affection il le brise: et de quelle diligence il le sugce” (G, 6).

rabelais and eloquence

149

since, as is well known, Alcofribas compares his own novel to a marrow bone and that he invites the reader to seek its sense with as much care as the dog does seeking marrow. Even so, the reader who is used to good manners may not appreciate being compared to a dog. It smells of cynicism, in all the senses of that word.19 Alcofribas seems to be a master of the mock-eulogy. And once again, we are faced with a form of eloquence capable of praising anything. Rabelais signed his last three novels with his own name. Does that mean that he became more serious? A dizain addressed to Marguerite de Navarre precedes the prologue of the Third Book (cw 248; oc 341), as if the author wanted to avoid having his reader lose control too soon. With the greatest respect, he asks the king’s sister, who was interested in Platonic notions, to be so kind as to leave the realm of ideas for the time it took her to read it, to come to know the “third section here below/ The joyous deeds of good Pantagruel” [“tierce partie / des faicts joyeux du bon Pantagruel”]. Since the queen was not a prude, it cannot be said that this dedication was unwarranted. But the prologue she would read along with everyone else was very likely to leave her puzzled. Unable to set aside his penchant for eulogies, Rabelais went on now, in an historical bent, to praise war. Everything was in place: a false etymology tying the Latin word bellum (war) to the Latin bellus (pretty, charming), a biblical passage twisted from its purpose made of the armies setting forth an image of the “ineffable perfection of the divine wisdom” (cw 256) [“perfection indicible de la sapience divine” (oc 348)]. What had horrified Erasmus now merited all sorts of praise.20 And what is there to say about the praise of Diogenes, the cynical philosopher: a flood of verbs, a flood of nouns, apostrophes to the reader. Rabelais’s eloquence was never more brilliant. Of what does he seek to convince us? Certainly not of the beauty of war or the usefulness of rolling a barrel, metaphor for the work. We are forced to admit that his language can bring him to a paranormal state, neither for the first nor the last time. This is perhaps a good juncture to recall that, in the 16th century, Rabelais was also known as a poet, to note that, at the end of the story, Panurge too will be in such a paranormal state. Once there, eloquence, at which he excelled, is no longer intended to convince or persuade but rather to convey emotion. The better to understand this, let us return to the famous letter from Gargantua to Pantagruel (P 8). It is rightly said that this letter was one of the greatest 19

20

Diogenes, who has a major role in the prologue of the Third Book, has evoked various reactions from humanists. See Michèle Clément, Le Cynisme à la Renaissance: D’Érasme à Montaigne (Geneva: 2005). See the edition of selected texts from Erasmus edited by C. Blum, A. Godin, J.-C. Margolin, D. Ménager (Paris: 1992), 909–973.

150

ménager

of humanist manifestos: praise of arts and sciences, of the printing press which facilitated access to texts, a bulimia for knowledge.21 This is all true. At the same time, it has been suggested that Rabelais went so far in his praise that he was barely believable.22 What are we to think, for example, of the old giant’s proclaiming: “I see today’s brigands, hangmen, adventurers, and grooms more learned than the scholars of my time” (cw 160)?23 Our reaction is that he is not serious, he is no longer believable. It would be better to say that Rabelais, speaking through his character, is not trying to be believable. He wants to be eloquent. That is the source of the hyperbole, taken from the storehouse of figures of speech. Nor should we exclude the possibility of a hidden current of parody. Nothing proves that the author is not poking gentle fun at some humanist panegyrics praising their own time. Rabelais’s prose thrives on excess, something we often find hard to understand. And there is a difference between excess and parody. Another example: Gargantua’s speech to the losers of the Picrocholine War (G 50). His clemency is to be expected as a product of his humanist education and his familiarity with ancient philosophers who had sung the praises of royal eloquence even before Corneille’s Cinna. But in recounting the tale of Grandgousier and Alpharbal, an improbable paean to generosity, he goes beyond the limits of the verisimilar. Generosity becomes so contagious that it passes from victor to vanquished as each seeks to outdo the other in demonstrating this virtue. Are we to take all this literally? No. Should we conclude that Rabelais is making fun of the idealist positions of some humanists of the period? Not that either. Rabelais’s nature is that everything he touches becomes exaggerated and feverish. That is the lens through which we should read some of the most famous passages of his work. For example, the episode of Thelema. Who would believe that, by some miracle, individual desires disappear effortlessly before the wishes of another? No reasonable reader can read without smiling the sentence declaring: “If some man or woman said, ‘Let’s drink,’ they all drank; if one said ‘Let’s go play in the fields,’ they all went” (G 57, 126).24 For all that, is Rabelais poking fun at the admirable effects of loving one’s neighbor? Nothing is less certain. What he fears above all is that the reader might reduce his text to a body of ideas to be found in a humanist milieu. Rhetoric is a

21 22 23 24

See especially Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: 1979). See Gérard J. Brault, “ ‘Ung abysme de science’: On the Interpretation of Gargantua’s Letter to Pantagruel,” bhr 28 (1966): 615–632. “Je voy les brigans, les boureaulx, les avanturiers, les palefreniers de maintenant plus doctes, que les docteurs et prescheurs de mon temps?” (oc 244). “Si quelqu’ un ou quelcune disoit ‘beuvons,’ tous buvoient. Si disoit ‘jouons,’ tous jouoient. Si disoit ‘Allons à l’ esbat aux es champs.’ tous y alloient” (oc 149).

rabelais and eloquence

151

welcome tool, it has the benefit of complicating the text, sometimes even of throwing things off track. Rabelais scholars are mistaken when they avoid the most eloquent passages in his work in favor of those with a more carnivalesque flavor (which may also be eloquent). Bakhtin is to be admired, but he was wrong to believe that in Rabelais’s France, as in the former ussr, there was an official culture which spoke with a strong voice, silencing that which did not please it, and that the only way in which it could be challenged was by recourse to the language of carnival. One of the consequences of this preconception is that the great Russian critic never focuses on ‘serious’ eloquence. This is a grave error since it brings with it an implicit condemnation of the connections between philosophy and eloquence. Philosophy was clearly less rigorously used in the Renaissance than in the Middle Ages, but, quite rightly, it considered that dialectics on their own could not persuade humans to love the truth. This is the perspective from which Rabelais’s impulsive outbursts should be understood. The Renaissance perspective, in its greatest representatives (Erasmus, Montaigne), also admitted that philosophy involved a risk, it spoke without being certain of what it was advancing. In few words or in many, philosophy works by propositions. Two passages from Rabelais illustrate this idea. The first appears in the series of consultations in the Third Book examining the question of Panurge’s marriage.25 Noting the successive failures of previous consultations, Pantagruel, having read Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, is brought to suggest that his friend consult a madman (tl 37). To persuade him to do this, he could have used a more dialectic approach. Instead, he piles up all kinds of wildly varying authorities, mixing the wisdom of nations and biblical teachings. We might have hoped for better. And then, suddenly, he starts to tell a story, an exemplum, borrowed from the literature of jurisprudence, the story of Seigny Joan and the Parisian porter (tl 37, 370) [“Seigny Joan et le faquin de Paris”]; he tells it with so much energy that Panurge becomes involved.26 Did he really demonstrate that madness was greater than reason? It is possible to doubt it, but this does not stop him, once again, from using hyperbole: “This decision of the Parisian fool seemed so equitable, and indeed admirable, to the aforesaid doctors, that doubt whether, in case the matter had been decided by the Parlement of the said place, or by the Rota in Rome, or indeed by the Areopagites, it

25

26

For more on these, see Verdun-Louis Saulnier, Rabelais, i. Rabelais dans son enquête: La sagesse de Gargantua, le dessein de Rabelais, troisième partie (Paris: 1983); and André Tournon, “En sens agile”: Les acrobaties de l’ esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: 1995). See Stéphan Geonget, La notion de perplexité à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2006), 119ff.

152

ménager

would have been more judicially decided by them” (cw 370–371).27 The oratorical mechanism is clear: three famous tribunals, presented in order of increasing importance, since none were better that the council of the Areopagus, a correctio (also called epanorthosis) that notched up Rabelais’s enthusiasm, the whole thing carried away by a sentence entirely Ciceronian in its sweep.28 Rabelais has nothing to learn from these masters of eloquence, and the more difficult his cause, the more he turns to the resources of eloquence to plead it. With the idea that those near death have a special wisdom from their proximity to the beyond, persuasion is even more in the author’s reach. In this case too, there is no lack of authorities. So, it is “normal” that Pantagruel advises Panurge to consult someone at death’s door, in the person of the old poet Raminagrobis (tl 21). But he does not stop at piling on philosophical authorities; into their midst he slips a personal recollection, that of the death of Guillaume de Langey, Rabelais’s patron and personal friend. This is not the first case where the author and his character exchange experiences. But this time it consists of more than a wink at the reader. We feel the giant’s emotion at the recollection of this exemplary death: “The three or four hours before his death, tranquil and serene in sense, he employed in vigorous words predicting for us what we have in part seen, in part are awaiting as coming” (cw 318).29 More important, this personal memory returns in one of the most metaphysical passages of the work: the account of the death of heroes (ql 27–28) whose double orchestration is truly magnificent. Pantagruel thinks again of the death of Langey, supporting his account by mentioning a number of historical persons who were at pains to come to his deathbed so as to hear his last words, but also adding something new: they were witness to the extraordinary manifestations that accompanied his death. Epistemon, Pantagruel’s former tutor, supports his account. He chooses to express this in a noble register. Frère Jean, although very ignorant, joins the discussion in a linguistic mode which is familiar to us and which acts as a kind of guarantee of veracity for the philosophical dialogue. In answer to his question, Pantagruel tells a “very strange story” (ql 27, 496) [“histoire bien estrange” (oc 603)], the tale of the death of Pan. Paraphrasing 27

28 29

“Cette sentence du fol parisien tant a semblé equitable, voire admirable es docteurs susdictz qu’ ils font doubte que, en cas que la matiere eust esté on Parlement dudict lieu, ou en la rotte à Rome, voire certes entre les Aréopagites decidée, si plus juridiquement eust esté par eulx sententié” (oc 470). Epanorthosis is the figure whereby the author or orator immediately corrects what has just been said. “Les troys et quatre heures avant son deces il employa en parolles viguoureuses, en sens tranquil et serain nous praedisant ce que depuys part avons veu, part attendons advenir” (oc 416).

153

rabelais and eloquence

Plutarch, Pantagruel says that “one evening” (“sus le soir”), the pilot of a Greek ship heard a mysterious voice ordering him to announce the death of Pan, “the great God” (ql 28, 497) [“le grand Dieu” (oc 604)]. Intrigued, he tries unsuccessfully to learn more and finally obeys the mysterious order. Just who is Pan, “the great God”? There is no doubt that for Pantagruel he is “the great Pastor, Who […] holds in His love and devotion not only his sheep but also his shepherds” (cw 498): Christ himself.30 All the more since in Greek, if one discounts accents, the name of the shepherds’ god and the one who signifies “All” are the same. Now, Christ is “our All. All that we are, all that we live, all that we have, all that we hope for is Him in Him, from Him, by Him” (cw 498).31 The formulation is nearly liturgical. Never has Rabelais expressed his Evangelism more forcefully and with more emotion than in these lines where Pantagruel is truly the spokesman of the writer. It is perhaps the most eloquent passage he ever wrote, which should be carefully considered when speaking of Rabelais’s religion. Of course, in the last paragraph, the author attempts to cover his tracks. Comedy seems to take over again starting with the detail that “tears […] as big as ostrich eggs” [“larmes grosses comme oeufz de Austruche”] stream from the giant’s eyes; or with the comic transformation of the set phrase, “Devil take me if I lie” [“Je me donne au diable si je mens”], which is turned into: “God take me if by one single word I’m lying about it.” (cw 498) [“Je me donne à Dieu, si j’en mens d’un seul mot” (oc 605)]. But it is just as important to note the “silence” and the giant’s “profound contemplation” [“profonde contemplation”] after he speaks. No conclusions about Rabelais’s religious convictions are possible. What matters to him is that in the memory of men there are strange tales, strictly speaking proving nothing, but which are worth thinking about. True eloquence sometimes needs to be still, ceding its place to silence and meditation.

∵ It would be false to think that eloquence as Rabelais thinks about it, exists in a vacuum, unaffected by the disputes of his day. Erasmus, for example, was not merely a mentor. Rabelais knew his thoughts about rhetoric and doubtless, the Ciceronianus (1528), written against the excessively zealous disciples

30 31

[Le] “grand pasteur […] qui […] non seulement a en amour et affection ses brebis, mais aussi ses bergiers” (oc 605). [Il est] “nostre Tout, tout ce que sommes, tout ce que vivons, tout ce que avons, tout ce que esperons est luy, en luy, de luy, par luy” (oc 605).

154

ménager

of the Roman orator.32 Their devotion went so far that they thought it impossible to do without the words used by their idol, an idea the Rotterdam humanist found both ridiculous and scandalous. The Ciceronians, especially widespread in Italy, had forgotten, among other things, that the theory of aptum demands a connection between res and verba (subject and style). This means that the choice of level of diction should vary according to the discourse of the moment, and that it was ridiculous to use the high style to speak of trivial things. The famous speech of Janotus de Bragmardo (G 19) ignores all these precepts, preferring a stuffy eloquence peppered with Latin quotations and filled with barbarisms. According to Mireille Huchon, Rabelais was caricaturing the sermons of the Franciscan Michel Menot, of which there were several printed editions in the first half of the 16th century.33 In contrast, when his giants or their representatives, like Ulrich Gallet, speak, Rabelais respects the principle of aptum. Who would deny that war is a serious subject, just as is education or the death of God? With this in mind, it seems inappropriate to criticize periods, ternary groups, or oratory balance taken directly from Latin rhetoric. For a long time, this was the reigning point of view. Terence Cave’s major work Cornucopia put a number of our ideas on rhetoric into question.34 He starts by considering copia and Erasmus’s treatise on the subject.35 In the classic conception of oratorical abundance, the student was required to learn the various ways of varying his expression by means of all sorts of exercises of which Erasmus offers many models. His aim is not to develop an empty eloquence, for nothing is worse than empty loquacity.36 As the English scholar remarks, the plenitude of language is to be found in the wealth of invention and imagination. Nothing surprising here. What is new is the place given to the proliferation of words. Is it disorderly, as is sometimes the case in nature? Should words be tamed? A verbal festivitas seizes the author of De Copia in his exercises of variations and synonymy. Cave goes so far as to suspect the presence of a sort of linguistic intoxication. Erasmus, unbeknownst to himself, becomes its devotee. Words are no longer expected to lead us quietly to meaning. They have their own value. It is tempting to read Rabelais from the point of view sketched out here. Cave, in the same book, devotes a chapter to him, which goes beyond the sin-

32 33 34 35 36

See Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chez Érasme, 815ff. oc, n. 1, 1110. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: 1979). See Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chez Érasme, 712ff. Cave, The Cornucopian Text, 48.

rabelais and eloquence

155

gle question of eloquence and which is often convincing. This difficult question may become clearer if we note that for Rabelais as for Erasmus, silence is an even greater danger than linguistic excess, or, to use the expression of the Renaissance, garrulitas.37 The most dangerous characters in his work are almost mute. When the ambassador, Ulrich Gallet, comes to demand reparations from Picrochole, the latter answers with only three laconic sentences, as rude as the speech of the ambassador was polished. Another tyrant is Clutchpuss (Grippeminaud), the archduke of the Furred Cats [Chats-fourrez]. This fearful character, symbol of a greedy justice, has only one word to say: “Here now” (cl 12, 637) [“Orça” (oc 753)], which means, by interpretation: “give me gold.” He is not able to say more than these few syllables, blocking any possible discussion with him. Moreover, as soon as he sees the narrator and his companions, he proposes an enigma for them to solve, which is not the best way to greet people, since enigmas, by their very nature, produce distress. In this chain of laconic and mute characters, the “Semiquavers” [“Fredons”] have a place. These strange creatures encountered by the travelers in the Fifth Book (ch. 26–27), also speak only in monosyllables. The episode is unquestionably difficult to interpret. V.L. Saulnier has suggested that it represents a “new attack on monasticism,” and its many duplicities, among which is refusing to establish real communication with others.38 In satirizing monks, Rabelais attacks, among other things, the misuse of silence, empty and devoid of any mystical echoes. To expect eloquence from a monk would be to deny the total sterility of his inner life. The need to speak constantly, to make fine speeches, may be distressing but it is preferable to the near silence of the Semiquavers, or, in Gargantua, the endless chants droned by the monks of Seuillé (G 27), who are also incapable of any discussion, and a fortiori, of demonstrating eloquence. In fact, on this point as on others, Rabelais is a disciple of Erasmus. For him, as for the humanist from Rotterdam, man is defined by his faculty of speech, homo loquens, as Jean-Claude Margolin has shown so well. The partisans of the monosyllable can be found beyond the worlds of judges and monks. Trouillogan, the skeptical philosopher of the Tiers Livre is also not a shining light of eloquence (tl 36). And yet, there is another explanation for his genuinely laconic tendencies. He refuses to participate in a dogmatic exchange on the question of marriage. Panurge wishes him among all the devils, but Pantagruel is careful not to cast blame on him. Trouillogan’s merit is his economical 37 38

See Jean-Claude Margolin, “Érasme et le silence,” in Mélanges sur la littérature de la Renaissance à la mémoire de V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1984), 163–178. “[N]ouvelle sortie contre le monachisme.”Rabelais ii. Rabelais dans son enquête: Étude sur le Quart et le Cinquième Livre (Paris: 1982), 225.

156

ménager

use of language. He could, no doubt, have engaged Panurge in a philosophical dialogue, were it not for his skepticism. He is fully in keeping with the Rabelaisian project which is to leave Panurge in charge of his undertaking. No one can decide in his place. There are times when interior silence is better than any words, be they Ciceronian or not. Let us go a bit further. The Spartans are famous for their mistrust of fine speaking while the Athenians, often to their detriment, were susceptible to the beauties of eloquence. Authoritarian regimes put eloquence to the service of dictators. There can be no doubt that political eloquence is useful to demagoguery, to the ambitions of a common adventurer to seize power. Yet it is hard to shut off civilized humans’ taste for eloquence. It is readily apparent that this is an aspect of the dignitas hominis. A person who does not appreciate eloquence is fundamentally a boor. Each of us is responsible for seeing whether words, forming figures of rhetoric and verbal music, have meaning. Rabelais’s work is filled with fine speeches. It would be totally absurd to discard them. As everyone knows, the Fifth Book ends at the dwelling of the oracle of the Bottle. It too is strangely laconic. “Trinch”: a single word, or perhaps merely a sound, not much for travelers come from afar seeking the truth and who, to that end, have braved many a danger. But Rabelais’s “conclusion” cannot be reduced to that single word, “Trinch.” The simplest honesty requires that we grant a greater place to the two speeches the priestess makes to Panurge and his companions (cl 45 and 47). Hers is a fine and brilliant eloquence of real substance. The first speech contains a few surprises still attached to Rabelais’s comic vein. This is not true of the second, philosophical from start to finish and which, as Mallary Masters suggests, can be considered as a manifesto of Platonism and Hermetism.39 There is not the slightest linguistic sign that might undercut it, to suggest that the author is once again jesting. The reference to the eaten book, present in the first speech, goes back to Ezekiel 3:1–3. He too, following God’s command, literally ate a book. Not enough has been made of the way that these two speeches return, with variations, to several Rabelaisian themes. The most important of these is perhaps that of gifts and exchange, the driver of societies and the calling of individuals, manifest from the start of Gargantua, with the “palaver of the potted” [“les propos des bienyvres”] (ch. 5), taken up again and enlarged in the utopia of Thelema (ch. 52–57), and the praise of debts (tl 2–5). But that is yet another mystery only partially accessible to humans: “Down here, in these circumcentral regions, we establish

39

George Mallary Masters, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic Hermetic Tradition (Albany: 1969), 105.

rabelais and eloquence

157

the sovereign good not in taking and receiving, but in handing out and giving” (cl 47, 715).40 Solemn formulations, intended to be etched in our minds, all the more as they are placed in the last chapter of Rabelais’s work. Those who believe unconditionally in Rabelais as a comic genius are no doubt disappointed when Bacbuc, daring to contradict one of the most famous lines of Alcofribas: “For it is laughter that becomes man best” (G, p. 2) [“Pource que rire est le propre de l’homme” (oc 3)], explains to the travelers that what becomes man best is nothing other than drinking (cl 45).41 Let us be clear: the drink in question here has nothing to do with what produces a soulless drunkenness. It is sufficient to recall that Panurge’s initiation makes him not drunk in the usual sense of the word but rather inspired: suddenly he is composing verses. Throughout time, and especially after Ficino’s commentaries on Plato, Bacchus (Dionysius) presided over a mystical delirium, fureur. The aim of Bacbuc (whose name echoes Bacchus’) is above all to legitimize the quest of Panurge, Pantagruel, and their companions. What really counts lies before them, not behind them. This quest will be under “the protection of that intellectual sphere whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere, which sphere we call God” (cl 47, 715).42 This well-known ‘definition’ of God is not entirely new, as the reader has already seen it in Pantagruel’s speech in favor of divination (tl 13, 388–389; cw 293–294). If we compare these two speeches, the first is seen to be filled with references to philosophical authorities, as humanism demands, but which the priestess takes on a more personal note. Another comparison is enlightening: between the manuscript of the Fifth Book and the text published in 1564.43 The first is inclined to jargon whereas the second is rather spare. Two expressions sum up the philosophy of this speech: everyone needs “Guidance of God” [“Guyde de Dieu”], and the “company of men” [“compagnie d’homme”]. These are the conditions of a real search for the truth. In all this, it is hard to spot an inappropriate use of oratorical flourishes. The big difference between this kind of eloquence and that of praise, known as epidictic rhetoric, is that the first does not seek to persuade. In measured tones, it expresses a philosophical credo. Has comedy died? Not in the least. It retains this teaching at arm’s length, received with a degree of irony by

40 41 42 43

“[Ç]a bas en ces regions circoncentrales, nous establissons le bien souverain, non en prendre et recevoir, ains en eslargir et donner” (oc 839). “Et icy maintenons que non rire, ains boire est le propre de l’homme” (oc 834); “Therefore we maintain that not by laughing but by drinking does man distinguish himself” (cw 710). “[L]a protection de ceste sphere intellectuale, de laquelle en tous lieux est le centre, et n’a en lieu aucun circonferance, que nous appelons dieu” (oc 839). oc, 911–912.

158

ménager

Panurge’s companions, astounded to see him in a trance. To the very end, Rabelais reserves the right to offer philosophical astonishment. Even better, he demands the authorial right to self-contradiction, as the best means of advancing thought. Translated by Marian Rothstein

chapter 7

Rabelais, Giants, and Folklore Walter Stephens

The question of François Rabelais’s relation to folkloric, popular, or unofficial culture has a long and somewhat contested history. First identified in the early 1800s by scholars in France, the popular or folkloric aspects of Pantagruel and Gargantua have engaged historians and critics ever since. Portions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Books have also received considerable attention, despite their more erudite or ‘official’ character. A major element in examinations of folklore in Rabelais’s œuvre has been the question of the giants, specifically, the degree to which he inherited ideas about giants in general or about Gargantua as a character in the culture of illiterate common people before his time. Entwined with this emphasis on ‘gigantology,’ particularly since the 1960s, has been the question of festivity and conviviality: the importance of food, wine, and fellowship. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World demonstrated that human corporeality underlay the thematic of Rabelais’s fictions in a way that was more systematic than the universal association of giants with gluttony, digestion, and elimination.1 Aside from food, wine, and excrement, other themes that reflect aspects of popular culture concern sexuality and gender, and their relation to questions of age and ageing, marriage, and misogyny. It has often been remarked that Rabelais’s world is almost exclusively male in its outlook, but the exceptions, such as the women of the Abbey of Thélème, the haughty Parisian lady, and certain “hags” (e.g., the Sibyl of Panzoust and the old lady of Panurge’s fable of the fox and the lion) also have something to tell us about attitudes toward women.2 Finally, the landscape of France itself is frequently described in terms that imply a connection to unwritten traditions.

1 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: 1968). 2 See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: 2009); Walter Stephens, “Sex, Popular Beliefs, and Culture: ‘In the Waie of Lecherie’,” in A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Renaissance, ed. B. Talvacchia (2011; repr. London: 2014), 137–155. Each of the six volumes in A Cultural History of Sexuality has a chapter on “Sex, Popular Beliefs, and Culture.” Vols. 1 and 2, … the Classical World and … the Middle Ages, are particularly relevant for our purpose here. On old women, see Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: 2004), 160–178.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_009

160

stephens

It is well to remind ourselves that ‘folklore’ and ‘popular culture’ are always ideologically loaded concepts. The writings of 19th-century French scholars were characterized by a patriotic attitude to France: that is, to the various peoples who have occupied the territory of modern France and ancient Gaul. Bakhtin’s monograph was informed by a Marxist vision of class conflict that he extended backward to medieval times. Susan Stewart raised the question of ideology to a new level when she identified “the gigantic” as one of four modes of narrative originating from the semiotic relation of the human observer’s own body to its surroundings.3 Richard Berrong reoriented the relationship between Rabelais and Bakhtin’s concept of folklore in several ways: by recalling that historians have shown that “what we term the ‘popular’ culture of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance was in fact every man’s culture”; by demonstrating the limitations of Bakhtin’s historical scholarship; by evoking its underlying allegorical relationship to Soviet cultural history; and by applying Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, developed outside Rabelais and His World, to Pantagruel.4 A number of studies since the late 1970s have broadened our attention to giants and cultural history, bringing to light the depth of ‘official’ culture behind Pantagruel, Gargantua, and their adventures.5

1

The ‘Discovery’ of Rabelais’s Folklore in France

In the wake of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Romantic fascination with the non-canonical, the naive, and the unlettered (best represented by the brothers Grimm in Germany), the ‘Folk’ as an essentialist, ethnic, and nationalist concept gained currency in France as elsewhere in Europe. The Édition variorum of Rabelais’s works, published in 1823, related that illiterate peasants in the French countryside told tall tales about a gigantic figure they

3 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: 1984). 4 Richard Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel (Lincoln: 1986); points three and four are developed on pp. 105–120. 5 Jean Céard, “La Querelle des géants et la jeunesse du monde,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1978): 37–76; Walter Stephens, “De Historia Gigantum: Theological Anthropology before Rabelais,” Traditio 40 (1984): 43–89; Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: 1989); Peter Gilman and Abraham C. Keller, “Rabelais, the ‘Grandes Chroniques,’ and Jean Lemaire de Belges,”er 30 (1993): 93–103; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures, 17 (Minneapolis: 1999); Silvia Huot, Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance (Notre Dame: 2016).

rabelais, giants, and folklore

161

called “Gargantua.” In 1834, scholars became aware that the Grandes chroniques du grand et énorme géant Gargantua, which Rabelais (alias Alcofrybas Nasier) compared favorably to the Bible in the Prologue to Pantagruel, was a surviving chapbook from the early 1530s, and not another of the imaginary books such as On the Dignity of Codpieces, which fill his first two books. A succession of scholars from Félix Bourquelot (1844) to Abel Lefranc (1913) argued that Gargantua was present in ‘French’ folklore since prehistoric times. Some argued that 19th- and early 20th-century oral tales of the giant were remnants of a Celtic cult of the sun-god, identified with the Gallic Hercules, also known as “the Devourer,” and that, “since a number of mountains later associated with Saint Michael bear or once bore a name resembling Gargan,” it is clear that the name is “that of a god, doubtless a pre-Celtic or even pre-Indo-European god, whose cult would have survived for long ages in the countryside.” The Church would have attempted to destroy the cult by rededicating the shrines of Gargan to Michael, and by presenting the pagan god as a demon, in line with Christian orthodoxy. The persistence of Gargantua among 19th-century French peasants would demonstrate that the Church’s program was only partially successful.6 The theory that Gargantua was a pagan god demoted to a ‘mere’ giant who passed directly from the timeless culture of illiterate peasants to the Grandes chroniques and Pantagruel has a number of weaknesses. In the first place, the name Gargantuas has not been attested earlier than the year 1470–1471, and then only as the apparent nickname of a man. Secondly, supporters of the folkloric thesis have tacitly argued that this very absence from written sources demonstrates the antiquity of Gargantua in oral culture; however, a binary opposition between oral and written culture has been repeatedly discredited. The only other evidence in support comes from the creative interpretation of toponyms and the tales collected among the 19th-century peasantry. Thirdly, the Grandes chroniques and the few other “Gargantuan Chronicles” discovered since 1823 are already hybrid productions, mixing features of erudite culture with elements that could be “folkloric,” but are not unequivocally so.7 The major weakness in the folkloric theory is the effort to discount Rabelais’s works and the Gargantuan Chronicles as sources of the name Gargantua in 19th-century oral culture. Proponents tacitly discount the evidence that reading aloud and listening to stories occupied an important place in early modern culture. This despite Rabelais’s emphasis on reading aloud in the Prologue to Pantagruel (including the life of Saint Margaret as a consolation for women in labor). Fourthly, the evidence for Gargantua in oral culture is somewhat 6 Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 15–16. 7 See the texts and commentary in Rabelais, oc, 1171–1210.

162

stephens

tainted. Although Éloi Johanneau had mentioned such oral tales in the Édition variorum, it was not until sixty years later that Paul Sébillot investigated the phenomenon more systematically. He made a rather disturbing admission, to wit, that he “had busied [himself] with the traditions of Haute-Bretagne for rather a long time, and had already gathered several hundred stories without ever having heard the name ‘Gargantua’ applied to legendary heroes,” before it occurred to him to ask his informants for stories about Gargantua.8 Like so much else in the folkloric thesis, this admission muddies the waters of the question. Moreover, later scholars, including the highly influential Abel Lefranc, took a number of liberties with Sébillot’s scholarship, essentially crediting him with their own more speculative conclusions.9 Finally, the folkloric thesis, insofar as it centers on the origin of Gargantua, has “negligible concrete import for the interpretation of Rabelais’s works.”10 A much stronger case can be made for oral culture as a component of Rabelais’s oeuvre in other features, such as his use of proverbs and references to non-literary figures among his contemporaries.11 The relevance of the Gargantua-as-folk-hero thesis lies outside the texts of Rabelais’s works. As previously mentioned, the folkloric thesis came to prominence in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Romantic exaltation of “the Folk.” It does not seem coincidental that crucial phases in the development of the thesis occurred at times of national crisis, particularly war. Johanneau’s critical edition (1823) followed the long devastation of the Napoleonic Wars; defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany thereafter, and the tragedy of the Paris Commune all happened during another spate of publication (1868–1883); Henri Dontonville overtly connected his interest in the hypothesis to the occupation of Paris by the Nazi army in 1940.12 This sort of patriotic mythography is not peculiar to French modernity; rather, the exaltation of Gargantua as the spirit of the French people is a belated echo of patriotic myths that flourished all over Europe from Rabelais’s childhood into the 17th century.13

8 9 10 11

12 13

Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 21. Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 12–16. Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 21. Claude Gaignebet’s massive À plus hault sens: L’ésotérisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, 2 vols (Paris: 1986) identifies a great mass of folklore and gives hypotheses (sometimes far-fetched) concerning its relevance to Rabelais. Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 17–19. Stephens, Giants in Those Days, ch. 4–7; Walter Stephens, “Discovering the Past: The Renaissance Arch-Forger and His Legacy,” in Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries: Rare Books and

rabelais, giants, and folklore

2

163

Mikhail Bakhtin’s Folkloric Rabelais

The key to Bakhtin’s interpretation of Rabelais is his notion of the “carnivalesque,” a spirit of festive transgressiveness in which the “grotesque body” takes over social interactions. Eating, drinking, excreting, and sex are indulged freely, even to excess; rather than the closed, self-contained body of classical and religious culture, with its emphasis on intellect, sentiment, and decorum, the grotesque body is “open to the world,” is, in fact, a bundle of orifices, ingesting and expelling the material world. This reveling in the “material body stratum” is the spirit of carnival, and is, at the same time, the spirit of the world upside-down, where fools are crowned king, while kings and other figures of authority are mocked and “uncrowned.” Bakhtin interpreted this upending of the world order as an expression of the common people’s eternal rebellion against repression and exploitation by figures of political, economic, and religious authority. He has been criticized for creating a binary opposition between the feast of Carnival, conceived as essentially rebellious, and the Church itself, as a rigid, monolithic institution. Despite the subtlety of his overall approach, he neglected to consider Carnival as a necessary component of the power structure governed by the Church, a “safety valve” for the people’s pent-up energies and desires rather than an autonomous, free expression of them. Integral to Bahktin’s interpretation of Rabelais’s texts as expressions of the carnivalesque spirit is the figure of the giant. Bakhtin proposes that, as the literal embodiment of appetite, physical strength, and (especially during the childhood of Gargantua and Pantagruel themselves), hedonistic abandon, Rabelais’s giants personify the material body and its unbridled excesses.14 By extension, the body of the giant comes to represent the indomitable spirit of the people—not simply the French, but all common people, all proletarians, in essence. Laughter, essential to the carnivalesque spirit and the grotesque body, is also the indispensable characteristic of the people and the giant. One major problem with Bakhtin’s conception of the giant as embodiment of the peo-

14

Manuscripts from the Arthur and Janet Freeman Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection, ed. E. Havens (Baltimore: 2014), 66–84. Francis Goyet, in “D’ Hercule à Pantagruel: L’ambivalence des géants,”Rabelais pour le xxie siècle. Actes du Colloque du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Chinon-Tours, 1994, ed. M. Simonin, (er) 33 (Geneva: 1998), 177–178, objects that Rabelais’s protagonists are not uniformly “good” giants, behaving like “ogres” as children and adolescents, and goes on to suggest Hercules as a model for such moral ambivalence. The classic studies on Hercules are Marc-René Jung, Hercule dans la littérature française du xvie siècle: De l’ Hercule courtois à l’ Hercule baroque (Geneva: 1966) and Claude-Gilbert Dubois, Celtes et Gaulois au xvie siècle: Le développement d’ un mythe nationaliste (Paris: 1977).

164

stephens

ple’s joyous carnival transgressiveness is that it ceases to have any relevance to Rabelais’s own giants after P vii and G xxii. Thereafter, the giants become representatives of official humanist and Christian culture, while the role of carnivalesque transgressor devolves to Panurge (P ix) and, to a lesser extent, to Frère Jean (G xxvii). Equally problematic is Bakhtin’s conception of the giant as an archetypal figure of folklore. This is in part because the publication of Rabelais and His World was belated. Completed in 1940, the Russian original was not published until 1965; in 1968 the English and French translations appeared. Owing to the prominence of the folkloric thesis between 1823 and 1940, Bakhtin’s concept of the giant is based prominently on Abel Lefranc’s presentation of the concept. Bakhtin combined the giants of the folkloric thesis with what he called “popular-festive giants,” by which he meant in part the gigantic figures mentioned in late-medieval descriptions of entrées and other civic ceremonies, and, less specifically, “the figure of the giant as part of folk festivals and carnivals.”15 There is a redundancy, however: evidence for Bakhtin’s folk-festival giants comes mainly from the descriptions of civic ceremonies just mentioned. The problem is that the surviving accounts show that these ceremonies were indeed festive, but not ‘popular’: they were organized by town councils, guilds, and other official bodies. Moreover, they did not always represent figures identified as giants: often, they were simply large effigies of normal-sized heroes, constructed on a scale to make them easily visible in crowded celebrations. So far as we know, when these figures were identified as giants, they were invariably portrayed as enemies, whose defeat was essential to the foundation of the polity. According to the authority on these “town giants,” the professional folklorist Arnold van Gennep, they had no original calendrical or functional relation to Lent and Carnival celebrations, and any association between the two kinds of celebration can be documented only at a late date.16

3

Susan Stewart’s Concept of the Gigantic

The patriotic ‘folkloric thesis’ and Bakhtin’s class-based analysis demonstrate both the power of wishful thinking and the fundamentally ideological nature of the giant. As if thinking along these lines, Susan Stewart titled her study 15 16

Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 24–27, 29–31. Arnold van Gennep, Le folklore de la Flandre et du Hainaut Français, 2 vols. (Paris: 1935– 1936), quoted in Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 39. See also Assaf Pinkus, “The Giant of Bremen: Roland and the ‘Colossus Imagination’,” Speculum 93, no. 2 (2018): 387–419.

rabelais, giants, and folklore

165

of the ideological relations between objects and narratives On Longing and emphasized the workings of nostalgia. While she inherited some misconceptions about giants from Bakhtin and the patriotic folklorists, she subjected the discourse on giants as a whole to a rigorous semiotic analysis of the corporeal basis for our ideas of scale and how they relate to narrative. The human body, she suggests, is the basis for human ideas of scale; our relation to both the gigantic and the miniature is antithetical, for they are hyperbolic in relation to the human frame. The miniature defines the human body as gigantic (as with dolls and doll houses), while the gigantic defines it as miniature (think of the world in Pantagruel’s mouth, P xxxii). The antithesis established by our own otherness in relation to these two scales is the opposition between nature and culture: “Whereas the miniature represents closure, interiority, the domestic, and the overly cultural, the gigantic represents infinity, exteriority, the public, and the overly natural.” Giants’ bodies are habitually associated with the landscape: foothills, heartland, the river’s mouth. Moreover, “this gigantic reading of the landscape is often supplemented in folklore by accounts of causality”: the Giant’s Causeway between Scotland and Ireland, river “potholes” as Giants’ Kettles.17 The dolmen “Pierre levée” (P v) and the forest flattened by Gargantua’s mare (G xvi) are examples in Rabelais. “The question of scale may explain why the ultimate fascination of the Giant is with his appetite, his capacity to devour or ‘contain’ ordinary human beings”: the Cyclopes, Jack and the Beanstalk, etc.18 The appetites of baby Gargantua and his parents (G iv–vii) and the world in Pantagruel’s mouth are benign Rabelaisian versions. On account of this disproportionate scale, the primal reaction inspired by giants is fear: “Truly primitive, folkloric Giants always figure an indifferent or hostile nature. Far from behaving like gods, Giants are benefactors only when duped or defeated; when they interact with gods, they usually do so as the gods’ sworn enemies.”19 Giants inhabit the earth, not a transcendent realm, “and it is their movement through the sensual world which gives shape and form to that world”; giants are by definition archaic: “giants, like dinosaurs, in their anonymous singularity always seem to be the last of their race.”20 Indeed, Rabelais’s are orphans or widowers: his only female giants, the mothers of Gargantua and Pantagruel, die or disappear; the amorous energies of Pantagruel himself appear directed at ordinary women, not giantesses (and

17 18 19 20

Stewart, On Longing, 70–71. Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 34. Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 36. Stewart, On Longing, 73–74.

166

stephens

his courtship is essentially a MacGuffin setting up a rebus and a pun) (P xxiii– xxiv). Will Pantagruel procreate? If so, how? Rabelais’s giant heroes, then, share only some features of truly folkloric giants, mainly their size. The essential goodness of Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel clashes with the history and semiotics of the giant in verifiable folklore, as well as in the civic festivities that Bakhtin misunderstood as expressions of a proletarian, subversive, carnivalesque spirit. Yet Rabelais does refer to his heroes as giants, not as overgrown men, thus raising two questions: (1) do his works contain other, more recognizably folkloric depictions of giants? (2) are there precedents for Rabelais’s divergences from folkloric ‘gigantology’? An episode in Pantagruel portrays Pantagruel combating and defeating an army of 300 evil giants led by Loup-Garou or “Werewolf.” Loup-Garou’s name reinforces the notion of his otherness from humanity: his name marks him as a ‘double being,’ capable of transformation into an animal. Common in folklore since antiquity, the werewolf assumed extraordinary importance beginning in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the spread of trials for demonic witchcraft; werewolves were depicted in a number of famous woodcuts in Rabelais’s time.21 Although the demonolatrous witch arose in the early 1400s, the wolf was an eternal enemy of humanity, a competitor for sheep, and, as werewolf, a devourer of humans, including children. The double nature or in-betweenness of the werewolf relates him (women took other forms than wolves, notably cats) to the biblical legend of giants as the offspring of women who coupled with fallen angels, which seems to derive from archaic folklore. The giant Bringuenarilles (ql xvii), is ridiculous and seemingly harmless; feeding on windmills and cooking utensils rather than human flesh, he obstructs human consumption. The genealogy of Pantagruel (ch. 1) is filled with the evil giants of folklore and literature, many cribbed from a contemporary encyclopedia, as well as giants invented by Rabelais.22

21

22

Eva Pócs, “Hungary and Southeastern Europe, Magic,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. R. Golden (Santa Barbara: 2006), 523; Peter Dinzelbacher, “Lycanthropy,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, 681–682; Carolyn F. Oates, “Metamorphosis,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, 754–757; Robin Briggs, “Dangerous Spirits: Shape-Shifting, Apparitions, and Fantasy in Lorraine Witchcraft Trials,” in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. K.A. Edwards (Kirkville: 2002), 1–24; Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre, “Such an Impure, Cruel, and Savage Beast: Images of the Werewolf in Demonological Works,” in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits, 181–197; illustrations in Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: 2002), figs. 13–15 (pages 284, 297, 298). Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 236.

rabelais, giants, and folklore

4

167

Normal Giants of Folklore as Recorded in Literature23

Our knowledge of giants in French and European oral culture before Rabelais is extremely limited. As Carlo Ginzburg and others have shown, folklore depends on our faith in the objectivity of the literate people who recorded oral tales.24 However, there are numerous passages in ancient and medieval literature that seem to reflect extremely archaic ideas about giants. Greek mythology is filled with evil giants: the Cyclopes and Lestrygones of Homer’s Odyssey are races of cannibals who prey on ordinary men.25 The Titans in Hesiod’s Theogony, and the Giants in Hesiod and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, oppose the gods in war, and Ovid tells that the blood of the defeated Giants spawned a race of bloodthirsty, lawless men, conspicuous among whom was Lykaon, the archetypal werewolf. Lykaon attempted to serve human flesh to Jove, who visited him in disguise and, angered at the sacrilege, transformed him into a wolf.26 Outraged at humanity in general, Jove killed everyone but Deucalion and Pyrrha in a great flood.27 Similarities between Ovid’s giants and flood and the account in Genesis, chapters 6 and 7, were noticed by ancient and medieval Christians. Indeed, for Christians down to Rabelais’s time and on through at least the 19th century, the archetypal giants were those of Genesis, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Genesis 6 tells that “the sons of God” became enamored of the “daughters of men” and sired a race of “mighty men of old.” By this time all humanity had become corrupt and sinful, so God sent the flood, which destroyed everyone but Noah, his three sons, and their wives. In early Jewish tradition the sons of God were identified as angels, and the mighty hybrid beings they sired on women came to bear much if not all the responsibility for the flood. These two interpretations survived in some Christian writers, although the majority rejected the idea that the sons of God were angels and blamed humanity, rather than the giants, for the flood. By the time of Saint Augustine, the “sons of God” were identified with

23 24

25 26

27

Except where noted, the information in this section is drawn from Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 58–97. Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi (1983; repr. New York: 1986); Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi (1980; repr. New York: 1988). Homer, Odyssey, trans. A.T. Murray, rev. G.E. Dimock, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 1995), vol. 1, 328–355 (i.e., 9.166–542), 364–369 (i.e., 10.80–132). Hesiod, Theogony, 126–210. Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, trans. G.W. Most (Cambridge, MA: 2006), 12–21; Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. F. Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 1977, repr. 1994), vol. 1, 12–19 (i.e., 1.150–239). Ovid, Metamorphoses, vol. 1, 18–27 (i.e., 1.240–347).

168

stephens

the male descendants of Adam’s third son Seth and the “daughters of men” with female descendants of Cain, leading to the interpretation that the giants were born from human miscegenation or mixing of races (Cain’s nature was often depicted as having been radically changed by his murder of Abel). Nimrod, the builder of the tower of Babel, was regularly described as a giant, since he was a rebellious “mighty hunter before the Lord.”28 These interpretations derived from the Vulgate text, whereas subsequent biblical scholars have construed the original passages very differently: the authoritative English translation of the Hebrew Bible says that Nimrod was “the first man of might on earth,” which accords well with the description of the giants in Gen. 6:4, but says that he was “a mighty hunter by the grace of the Lord.”29 Another corollary of the notion that the giants were responsible for the flood was the implication that the flood had destroyed them utterly. Yet giants appeared in the postdiluvian world. The Philistine Goliath of Gath, defeated by David, is never called gigas (giant) in the Vulgate, but the description of his height (“six cubits and a span,” over 9.5 feet or 2.9 meters) and the weight of his arms and armor (his spearhead weighed 600 shekels, about 18.75lb or 8.5 kg) were certainly superhuman.30 The spies that Moses sent into Canaan returned complaining that it was peopled by “men of great size,” and referred to them by the same name translated as “giants” in Gen. 6:4 (Nephilim). In comparison to these giants, “we looked like grasshoppers.”31 All of Canaan seems inhabited by giants, as multiple passages in Numbers and Deuteronomy attest. One giant, Og of Bashan, was half again the size of Goliath: his iron bedstead was nine cubits long and four wide. All of Bashan is known as terra gigantum, the land of giants, and Og himself is referred to as the last of the giant race.32 According to the mid-14th century commentator Nicholas of Lyra, this last verse led medieval Jewish commentators to claim that Og “escaped the Flood because of his size and strength.” Lyra also noted that rabbinical scholars identified Og as “the one who escaped” in Gen. 14:13, a story about Abraham and Lot, implying a very long life. One early rabbinical commentary (believed to originate between the first and third centuries a.d.) asserts that Noah allowed Og to ride on the outside of the Ark in exchange for promising that his descendants would be the slaves of Noah’s posterity. This version resembles Rabelais’s description of Hur-

28 29 30 31 32

“… potens in terra et erat robustus venator coram Domino,” Gen. 10:8–9 (Vulgate). Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. The New jps Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: 1985), 15. 1 Sam. 17:4–7. Num. 13:33 (Vulgate 13:34). Deut. 3:13, 11.

rabelais, giants, and folklore

169

taly, who rode Noah’s Ark like a hobbyhorse in exchange for steering it by using his legs as a rudder. As a medieval biblical commentator would, Rabelais’s unreliable narrator Alcofrybas uses this story to describe how the giants survived the flood, even though Genesis says only Noah’s family escaped.33 Gargantua opens (ch. 1) with the discovery of an ancient giant’s tomb. Famous examples known to Rabelais’s contemporaries included a story told by Giovanni Boccaccio in his Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. Near Trapani in Sicily, peasants discovered a sealed cave containing the seated body of a giant, holding a staff as tall as the mast of a ship. The exaggeration in this story is worthy of Rabelais: no one dares touch the cadaver until 300 witnesses have gathered; local mathematicians estimate that the giant’s height was 200 cubits (around 300 feet or 92 meters). When someone finally dares to touch the giant’s cadaver, it crumbles to dust, leaving only three enormous teeth, parts of his skull and thighbone, and the leaden core of his staff.34 Rabelais/Alcofrybas mentions no cadaver at all, but rather a variety of objects, including the manuscript of Gargantua’s genealogy, already described in the first chapter of Pantagruel. There is a variety of apparent literary allusions in the discovery, particularly to Roman literature: the imaginary tomb of Pseudo-Dictys of Crete allegedly contained his Diary of the Trojan War along with his cadaver, while the supposed sarcophagus of Numa Pompilius contained nothing but books on religion and philosophy. Both were forgeries and may have been recognized as such by some of the ancients and some of Rabelais’s contemporaries. Jean Lemaire de Belges repeats some of this lore in his Illustrations de Gaule et Singularités de Troie.35 But the discovery of huge ancient tombs has a long literary pedigree that may stretch back to folklore of Homeric times. Adrienne Major has collected a startling number of accounts describing gigantic skeletal remains in authors from the 5th century b.c. to the 5th century a.d.36 She plausibly hypothesizes that discoveries of tombs containing gigantic bones mentioned by Greek writers of the 6th and 5th centuries b.c. could reflect discoveries of actual tombs. The bones were usually identified as those of heroes: not actual giants but huge men of very ancient times, such as Hector, Orestes, and other figures connected with the Trojan War, who were described by Homer and Vergil. 33 34 35

36

Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 239–243. Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 157–158; see Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, trans. J. Solomon, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: 2011), 602–605. Stephens, Giants in those Days, 306–312; Richard Berrong, “Jean Lemaire de Belges, Dictys of Crete, and Giovanni Boccaccio: Possible Sources for Gargantua, Ch. 1,” er 17 (1983): 89–92. Adrienne Major, The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (2000; repr. with new intro., Princeton: 2011), 126, table 3.1.

170

stephens

It has long been known that “giants’ bones” reflect discoveries of fossilized skeletal remains of mammoths, mastodons, and other prehistoric creatures. These fossils are still found in abundance around the Mediterranean in areas where ancient Greek and Roman accounts locate the discovery of “heroes’ tombs.” Major shows convincingly how ancient people, unaware of the existence and extinction of mammoths, would have been led to interpret them as the bones of gigantic humans. Using models of human and mammoth skeletons, she rearranged the latter to create a plausible giant’s or hero’s skeleton.37 She conjectures that a number of such skeletons were reburied in tombs and then rediscovered after long intervals. The discovery of the “tomb of Orestes” around 560b.c., as told by Herodotus a century later, provides a famous example. An oracle had commanded the Spartans to “bring Orestes to your city” or they would never conquer Arcadian Tegea. They searched in vain until, during a lull in hostilities, a Spartan cavalryman encountered a Tegean smith who told him of discovering “a huge coffin—7 cubits long!” containing a skeleton of the same size. In time, the cavalryman obtained the skeleton and delivered it to Sparta where it was reburied. The Spartans then defeated Tegea and obtained absolute rule over the Peloponnese. Major notes that Tegea lies in a prehistoric lake basin that contains the remains of mammoths and other Ice Age mammals … With this in mind, classical scholar George Huxley suggests the following sequence of events: In the eighth or seventh century b.c., when the cult of hero relics began, “large bones of a Pleistocene date were discovered” and “given a respectful burial in a [10]-foot coffin fit for a hero.” A century or so later, the blacksmith “found the reburied bones when digging a well.”38 Major calls this “the most prominent incident in a long-lasting Panhellenic bone rush. City-states all around the Greek world scrambled to recover the huge remains of heroes in the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries b.c. Chance fossil finds now spurred deliberate bone hunting.”39 A similar find was made by the Athenian general Kimon in 476b.c. He captured the island of Skyros, where, according to legend, Theseus had been murdered. “Noticing an eagle tearing at a mound, he ordered his men to dig there. They unearthed some oversize bones lying beside a bronze-pointed spear and sword (the sort used in the 37 38 39

Major, First Fossil Hunters, 122–123, figs. 3.4–3.5. Major, First Fossil Hunters, 110–111. See The Landmark Herodotus. The Histories, ed. R.B. Strassler, trans. A.L. Purvis (New York: 2007), 37–40 (i.e., 1.66–68). Major, First Fossil Hunters, 111–112.

rabelais, giants, and folklore

171

Bronze Age).” Kimon exported the relics to Athens, where they “were welcomed with magnificent processions and interred in the heart of the city.”40 Plutarch tells a similar story about the Roman general Sertorius’ decision to excavate the mound that the people of Tingis in Morocco believed was the grave of Antaeus, the giant slain by Hercules; sure enough, his men found a skeleton, “supposedly 60 cubits long (85 feet; 26m)” and reburied it. Major notes that the area corresponds to both “the traditional geographical distribution of the extinct race of giants featured in Greek myths” and “actual fossil beds” containing extinct elephants, mammoths, and “giant giraffids.”41 Such reburials of fossil bones occurred “by the hundreds as saints’ relics” throughout the Middle Ages. Rabelais would have been familiar with some of these accounts, and—who knows—the tomb in Gargantua may have influenced the supposed discovery in 1613 of the “tomb of Teutobochus,” denounced in its own time as a French forgery. Teutobochus was a “gigantic” Germanic king defeated by the Romans in 105 b.c.42 Augustin Calmet (d. 1757), the great Benedictine commentator on the Bible, went even further than Adrienne Major, discussing “Teutobochus” and numerous discoveries of “giants’ bones” and tombs from antiquity to his own times in his Dissertation sur les géans. Although Calmet concluded “it is certain that in many places real bones of Giants are conserved, and consequently that the existence of Giants is an indubitable fact,” he conceded that some “giants’ bones” were probably remains of elephants and whales.43

5

Good Giants before Rabelais

There are a few exceptions to the norm of evil folkloric giants. The most conspicuous example before Rabelais’s time was Saint Christopher. Whatever his ultimate origin, Christopher became the folkloric giant par excellence in the Middle Ages. He was the patron saint of travelers owing to the belief that he had converted after carrying the Christ-Child across a raging torrent (Christophorus means “carrier of Christ” in Greek). Large effigies of Christopher were 40 41 42 43

Major, First Fossil Hunters, 112. Major, First Fossil Hunters, 121–126. Major, First Fossil Hunters, 77. Augustin Calmet, “Sur les géans,” in La Sainte Bible en latin et en françois …, vol. 1 (Paris: 1748), 248–275; Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 95–96. Léonard Ginsburg, “Nouvelles lumières sur les ossements autrefois attribués au géant Theutobochus,” Annales de Paléontologie 70.3 (1984): 181–219 examines the 17th–20th-century bibliography as well as the fossils.

172

stephens

often displayed on the external walls of churches and cities for the benefit of wayfarers. Like some of the “town giants,” these effigies may not have originally derived from the notion that Christopher was a giant, but by the time of the Golden Legend (1270), the foremost medieval Latin collection of saints’ lives, he had been formally defined as such. A contributing factor may have been Christopher’s prehistory in the Greek Church: there he was portrayed as a Cynocephalus, one of a race of “dog-headed” people from the edge of the known world, where the “monstrous races” lived.44 Converted from heathen savagery and baptized, Christopher inspired the conversion of countless others, demonstrating the inherent power of Christianity and its sacraments. At some point in the Latin hagiographical tradition, prior to the Golden Legend, a compiler seems to have misread a Latin paraphrase of “cynocephalus,” caput canineum (“doglike head”) or genere canineorum (“the doglike race”) as caput cananeum (“Canaanite head”) or genere cananeorum (the Canaanite race). Since several of the races the Israelites encountered in Canaan are described as giants, the error reinforced the notion that Christopher was a giant, so the Legend referred to him as “a retainer of a certain king of the Canaanites.” Before his conversion, Christopher possessed all the negative qualities of folkloric giants: inordinate pride, slavery to appetite, an inability or refusal to pray, and general stupidity.45 His martyrdom was appropriately hyperbolic, as was the number of pagans it inspired to convert.

6

Fictional Giants

The majority of good giants in Rabelais’s time were found in fiction and in literary forgery. Among fictional giants the most famous was Morgante, the eponymous hero of Luigi Pulci’s comic romance of the same name (1483).46 Like Saint

44

45 46

John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: 1981); see also Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges: L’insolite au xvie siècle en France (Geneva: 1977) and Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Wonder,” American Historical Review 102.1 (1997): 1–26. Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 43–50; Gaignebet, À plus hault sens, vol. 1, 309–325. Cohen, Of Giants, 166–172, adds Fierabras, Otniel, and Rainoart (converted giants in the cycles of Charlemagne and Guillaume d’ Orange) to Christopher. He rightly points out that “wholly missing from Giants in Those Days is a consideration of the giants of English and French romance.” But I cannot understand where he got the idea that “Stephens has argued that Rabelais invented the comic giant,” that giants “were uniformly evil from the time of the Old Testament until Rabelais created [sic] Gargantua,” or that I present “the giants of the Middle Ages” as “glum” and “monolithically evil” (Cohen, Of Giants, 166).

rabelais, giants, and folklore

173

Christopher, Morgante was originally an evil giant, one of three brothers who periodically ravaged a monastery. Orlando (Roland), angered at Charlemagne’s habitual submissiveness to Gan (Ganelon), fled the court to wander in Pagania (“Pagandom”). Arriving at the monastery, Orlando learned of the three giants and slew two of them. Morgante, meanwhile, slept soundly in his hut, oblivious to the fracas. Like Saint Christopher, he had a prophetic dream, interrupted by Orlando’s pounding on his door. Learning that Orlando was a Christian, Morgante recounted his dream: Rispose il saracin con umil voce: “Io ho fatta una strana visïone, che m’assaliva un serpente feroce: non mi valeva, per chiamar, Macone; onde al tuo Iddio che fu confitto in croce rivolsi presto la mia devozione; e’ mi soccorse e fui libero e sano e son disposto al tutto esser cristiano.”47 Orlando and Morgante pay their respects to the monastery, where the abbot blesses them and Morgante chooses his iconic weapon, the clapper of an enormous bell. They depart and soon encounter an enchanted castle, where they have a sumptuous meal but then wander aimlessly for three days, seeking a way out. On the third day a voice from a tomb informs them that unless they combat the speaker (who turns out to be a devil) they will wander there forever. But the devil says he cannot be reimprisoned until Orlando baptizes Morgante (which, strangely, the monks had not done). This once accomplished, the castle vanishes without explanation. Emboldened, Morgante makes a proposal that will echo through Folengo’s Baldus and Rabelais’s Pantagruel: if they can find an entrance, he and Orlando should invade hell as Orpheus did, and free the captive souls.

47

Luigi Pulci, Morgante, ed. F. Ageno, 2 vols. (1955, repr. Milan: 1994), vol. 1, 18, (i.e., 1.40). Morgante: The Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante, trans. J. Tusiani (Bloomington: 1998) is a good teaching translation but somewhat loose; because Pulci’s language can be difficult, I add my own translations. Here: “The Saracen replied in a submissive voice, / I have had a strange dream / that a ferocious serpent attacked me; / it did me no good to call on Mahound, / so to your God who was nailed on the cross / I quickly turned my prayers; / he came to my aid and I was freed and saved / and I’m fully ready to be a Christian.”

174

stephens

… e taglierei la coda a quel Minosse, se come questo ogni dïavol fosse; e pelerò la barba a quel Caron, e leverò della sedia Plutone; un sorso mi vo’ fare di Flegeton e inghiottir quel Fregiàs con un boccone; Tesifo, Aletto, Megera e Ericon e Cerbero ammazzar con un punzone; e Belzebù farò fuggir più via ch’un dromedario non andre’ in Soria. Non si potrebbe trovar qualche buca?48 Orlando quashes this idea by informing Morgante that there’s nothing to eat in hell; anyway, it’s too hot and it stinks. Instead, the two embark on adventures that mix brigandage and chivalry, rescuing maidens, allying themselves with princes and amazons, mooching or stealing colossal meals, and defeating armies, giants, and monsters. Pulci’s most infamous character is Morgante’s other bosom buddy Margutte, the half-giant.49 Their meeting resembles that of Pantagruel and Panurge, for their friendship is instantaneous. To Morgante’s question whether he is a Christian or a Saracen, Margutte replies: … A dirtel tosto, io non credo più al nero ch’a l’azzurro, ma nel cappone, o lesso o vuogli arrosto; e credo alcuna volta anco nel burro, nella cervogia, e quando io n’ho, nel mosto, e molto più nell’aspro che il mangurro; ma sopra tutto nel buon vino ho fede, e credo che sia salvo chi gli crede; e credo nella torta e nel tortello l’uno è la madre e l’altro è il suo figliuolo,

48

49

Pulci, Morgante, vol. 1, 44 (i.e., 2.38.7–40.1): “And I’d cut the tail off that Minos / if all the devils were like the one just now; / and I’ll pluck out Charon’s beard, / and unseat Pluto from his throne; / I’ll drink Phlegethon at one gulp, / and swallow that guy Phlegyas whole; / Tisiphone, Alecto, Megaera, and Erichtho / and Cerberus I’ll kill with one punch; / and I’ll make Beelzebub flee farther / than a dromedary could travel in Syria. / Couldn’t we find a way in?” Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 65.

rabelais, giants, and folklore

175

e il vero paternostro è il fegatello, e posson esser tre, due, ed un solo.50 Margutte is even more dismissive of Islam than of Christianity, declaring that Mohammed must be a ghost, since he prohibits wine; “Apollo” must be delirium, and Trivigante, the third member of the imaginary Muslim “anti-trinity,” might be the witches’ sabbath (tregenda), which many humanists and clerics still dismissed as a hallucination.51 “Faith is like tickling,” he says, but declines to say further, perhaps implying that it is like ticklishness—one either has it, or doesn’t. “You could say I’m a heretic,” he admits, and adds “I’m not a suitable terroir for a vineyard.” “Faith,” he continues, “is just as one inherits it” (“come l’uom se l’arreca”); “want to know mine? I was born in Turkey from a Greek nun and an orthodox papasso [priest].” Originally, he wanted to be a minstrel, and sing of Troy and Hector and Achilles, but tired of that and went about armed. He slew his father after a quarrel in a mosque, picked up his scimitar, and hit the road, “e per compagni me menai con meco / tutti i peccati o di turco o di greco” (“and took with me as my companions / all the sins of both Greeks and Turks”). These sins are legion, … anzi quanti ne son giù nello inferno: io n’ho settanta e sette de’ mortali, che non mi lascian mai la state o ’l verno; pensa quanti io n’ho poi de’ venïali! Non credo, se durassi il mondo etterno, si potessi commetter tanti mali quanti ho commessi io solo alla mia vita, ed ho per alfabeto ogni partita.52 50

51

52

Pulci, Morgante, vol. 2, 521 (i.e., 18.115.1–116.4) “… to tell you right away, / I believe no more in black than blue, / but in capon, whether stewed or roasted; / and sometimes I also believe in butter, / in beer, and, when I can get it, must [new wine], / and I believe the sharp kind more than the sweet; / but above all my faith is in good wine; / and I believe whoever believes in it will be saved; / and I believe in cake and tart: / one is the mother, the other her son; / and the true Our Father is the pork-liver kabob, / and they can be three, two, or one.” Florentine fegatello has three ingredients: chunks of pork liver and laurel leaves wrapped in rete (the netlike omentum) and grilled or roasted. Margutte continues lauding fegatello in 18.125–126. On controversies about the reality of the witches’ sabbath, see Stephens, Demon Lovers, 87–179, and Stephens, “The Sceptical Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. B.P. Levack (Oxford, Eng.: 2013), 101–121. Pulci, Morgante, vol. 2, 522–523 (i.e., 18.119.7–120.8) “… in fact, as many as are down below

176

stephens

Indeed, he launches into an endless litany of tricks, deceits, thefts, and— equally important—cooking tips. His three cardinal virtues are gluttony, dice, and arse (culo): he has pimped more than a thousand women. The list goes on and on: we are told that Morgante listened motionless for an hour or more.53 However, Io t’ho lasciato indrieto un gran capitolo di mille altri peccati in guazzabuglio; ché, s’i’ volessi leggerti ogni titolo, e’ ti parrebbe troppo gran mescuglio; e cominciando a sciòrre ora il gomitolo, ci sarebbe faccenda insino a luglio; salvo che questo alla fine udirai: che tradimento ignun non feci mai.54 The two friends do play pranks and tricks on each other, however. Margutte indeed dies of laughter after one of Morgante’s tricks. While the half-giant sleeps, Morgante steals his boots; a monkey finds them before Margutte does and commences putting them on and taking them off. Questa bertuccia se gli rimetteva: allor le risa Margutte raddoppia, e finalmente per la pena scoppia; e parve che gli uscissi una bombarda, tanto fu grande dello scoppio il tuono.55 Although Morgante did not plan or intend it, the monkey’s interference with the prank literalizes the expression for extreme ludicrousness: una bertuccia in zoccoli, a monkey in clogs.

53 54

55

in hell: / I have seventy-seven of the mortal ones, / that never abandon me in summer or winter: / so think how many venial ones I’ve got! / I don’t believe, if the world lasted forever, / as many evils could be committed, / as I alone have committed in my life; / and I can recite them as easy as the alphabet.” Pulci, Morgante, vol. 2, 523–531 (i.e., 18.121–141). Pulci, Morgante, vol. 2, 531 (i.e., 18.142): “I’ve left out a big chapter / all higgledy-piggledy of a thousand other sins; / for if I wanted to recite you every paragraph, / you’d think it too great a mishmash; / and if I started unwinding the hank now, / we’d be busy until July; / but to finish up, listen to this: / I never betrayed anyone [i.e., a friend].” Pulci, Morgante, vol. 2, 592 (i.e., 19.148.6–149.2): “This monkey put them on again: / then Margutte redoubled his laughter, / and finally blew up from the pressure; / and it sounded like a bomb went off, / so loud was the thunder of the explosion.”

rabelais, giants, and folklore

177

Margutte lives on, in a fashion, or rather is illusorily reincarnated by a magic trick. During a battle outside Paris with the army of the warrior-queen Antea, Orlando’s forces are in desperate straits owing to Antea’s two giants, Fallalbacchio and Cattabriga, who are so tall that if Nimrod had had them he could have dispensed with the tower by simply stacking the two giants.56 The sorcerer Malagigi finds a solution, however, using his peerless magic. In questo, in mezzo al prato hanno veduto un uom, che parea stran più che Margutte, e zoppo e guercio e travolto e scrignuto, e di gigante avea le membra tutte, salvo che il capo era a doppio cornuto; saltella in qua ed in là come le putte, e scherza e ride …57 Because he is a sorcerer’s illusion, Marguttino is a completely fantastic creature: like Margutte, he is a gigantino, a little giant; he mugs like a baboon and dances like a monkey and is compared to manikins and clowns; he appears and disappears like a firefly or a guttering candle, taunts the giants as a crow taunts a dog, and bares his arse at them. He leads them into a thicket of bird-limed trees that immobilize them, allowing Orlando’s squire to set them ablaze.58 Nothing else is recounted of Marguttino. As Rabelais will do, Pulci constantly plays with expectations of giants raised by traditional narratives. After the death of Margutte, he cites as source “a certain Egyptian book,” called The Statutes of Women, authored by one Alfamennone, which underwent a long series of translations, beginning with Persian and ending with Florentine.59 After the disappearance of Marguttino, Pulci appends a long apologia defending his narrative truthfulness and his exposition of sorcery and demonology. Morgante’s end is hyperbolically ironic: after delivering his friends from a violent tempest at sea by replacing the ship’s mainmast, and then killing the whale that attacks the ship immediately afterward, Morgante dies, not defeated by the whale but bitten on the heel by a tiny crab.60 56 57

58 59 60

Pulci, Morgante, vol. 2, 798–803 (i.e., 24.58–76). Pulci, Morgante, vol. 2, 807 (i.e., 24.92.1–7): “Then in the middle of the field they saw / a man, who seemed stranger than Margutte, / and lame and crosseyed and twisted and hunchbacked, / and all his limbs were those of a giant, / except that his head was doubly horned; / he jumps here and there like magpies, / and jokes and laughs …” Pulci, Morgante, vol. 2, 807–811 (24.93–102). Pulci, Morgante, vol. 2, 593 (i.e., 19.153–154); Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 210. Pulci, Morgante, vol. 2, 609–619 (i.e., 20.27–56).

178

stephens

Both Orlando furioso (1532), which Rabelais mentions several times, and Orlando innamorato (1495), which he seems not to have read, are filled with evil giants, but lack what we could call Morgante-figures.61 Notable in Boiardo’s Innamorato is the evil giant Zambardo, whose hidden springe, a net of massive iron chains, ensnares Orlando just as he kills the giant. After interminable tedious admonitions from a hermit, the hero is liberated by a hungry—and doomed—cyclops.62 Ariosto’s poem has its share of evil giants, who are even more spectacular than Boiardo’s. Like Zambardo, the cannibal Caligorante devours wayfarers after snaring them in a magical net.63 This net, however, is a work of divine art, not a clunky human artifact; indeed, it is the nearly invisible net, “thin, like spider webs,” with which the jealous Vulcan trapped Venus and Mars in flagrante.64 Terrified by a blast from the paladin Astolfo’s magic horn, Caligorante falls into his own trap. As Rabelais does, Ariosto implicates his giant in a textual genealogy. After being stolen by Mercury and used to trap the ethereal Chloris, Vulcan’s net was enshrined in the temple of Anubis on the Nile, whence, 3000 years later, Caligorante stole it.65 The net opens a series of Odyssey-like adventures for Astolfo that will take him around the world and even to the moon. Closest in spirit to Rabelais is Teofilo Folengo, author of Baldus (1521). This 25-book mock epic is written in “Latin” hexameters—that is, in dialectal Italian with Latin desinences. Like Pantagruel, the eponymous hero (who is not a giant but a noble raised as a peasant) is surrounded by a troupe of companions possessing special talents, among whom two are important for Rabelais: Cingar, a Panurge-like trickster, and Fracassus, … razza gigantum, cuius longa fuit (certe non dico bosiam) per bellum punctum brazzos persona quaranta. Grossilitate staro maior sibi testa dabatur; intrasset boccam totus castronus apertam

61 62 63

64 65

Dates for romances of Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Folengo are those of the first complete editions. Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando innamorato (Bologna: 2011), lib. 1, canti 5.78–6.34. Online at http://www.torrossa.com/resources/an/2483782. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. L. Caretti (1966; repr. Turin: 1971), 394–401 (i.e., 15.42–62). Ariosto’s Orco (17.29–65), inherited from Boiardo (lib. 3, canto 3.27–31) is a Polyphemus-figure. Homer, Odyssey, vol. 1, 290–299 (i.e., 8.266–366). Ariosto, Orlando furioso, 399–400 (i.e., 15.57).

rabelais, giants, and folklore

179

auriculis suis fecisset octo stivallos atque super frontem potuisses ludere dadis.66 Indeed, Fracassus is a descendant of Morgante.67 Like Morgante (and Pantagruel), he defeats a monstrous whale: so monstrous, indeed, that, as in Boiardo and Ariosto, it is first mistaken for an island; Fracassus encounters the whale after serving as the mainmast of a gigantic ship.68 Because it is set largely in a world of peasants, Folengo’s Baldus has a rich vein of motifs that appear directly or indirectly related to folklore. While Fracassus and his feats are overtly related to the literary model of Pulci, the emphasis on food and wine in Baldus—as in Morgante itself—is folkloric in the Bakhtinian, carnivalesque sense. ‘Macaronic’ as a linguistic and poetic term dates from at least the time of Pulci, and Folengo firmly situates his mock-epic in a world of gluttony. The poem’s opening evokes a land of Bengodi or Cockaigne; indeed, a landscape of pasta, sausages, broth, and gravy is Folengo’s Parnassus; his Muses resemble fat peasant women and bear names like Gosa and Togna. They spend their time cooking and roll huge gnocchi down mountainsides of grated cheese which makes them as large as barrels: “Hic macaronescam pescavi primior artem, / hic me pancificum fecit Mafelina poëtam.”69 The second book is largely dedicated to the arrival of Baldus’s exhausted eloping noble parents at the farm of peasant Berto, who generously takes them in. Every aspect, from the barking guard-dog in the farmyard (“En mastinus abit contra baubauque frequentat”) to the dinner preparations is lovingly described. The doughty pregnant princess pitches in to help Berto cook; she “removes the gloves from her snow-white hands and the sleeves from her shapely white arms”, then “takes a knife, and scaling the fish, throws away the

66

67

68 69

“… of the race of giants, whose height was exactly, on the dot (I am definitely not telling a lie) forty cubits. His head was bigger than a bushel, and a whole sheep could fit into his open mouth. You could make eight boots out of his ears, and shoot dice on his forehead,” Teofilo Folengo, Baldo [sic], ed. A.E. Mullaney, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 2007–2008), vol. 1, 106–107 (i.e., 4.53–59). “… progenies calavit ab illo / qui bacchioconem campanae ferre solebat” (“His ancestors descended from that Morgante who used to carry around a church bell clapper”), Folengo, Baldo, vol. 1, 108–109 (i.e., 4.79–80). Folengo, Baldo, vol. 2, 236–251, 266–269 (i.e., 20.70–295, 553–588); cf. Boiardo, Orlando innamorato, lib. 2, canti 13.54–14.9; Ariosto, Orlando furioso, 132–134 (i.e, 6.37–42). “This is where I first [fished out] the macaronic arts; and where [the Muse] Mafelina made me a paunchy poet,” Folengo, Baldo, vol. 1, 2–5 (i.e., 1.1–61).

180

stephens

guts and pulls the skin off the frogs as if she were pulling off their trousers.”70 Another vein of folklore concerns witchcraft; it dominates much of the final cantos, in which Baldus and his crew overwhelm and defeat an army of witches.71 They are in the process of dismantling hell when a Marguttino-like figure appears and lures them into a gigantic hollow gourd; once it was large enough to “make soup for the whole world.”72 Now its empty shell is the special abode of poets, astrologers, and others “qui fingunt, cantant, dovinant somnia genti, / complevere libros follis vanisque novellis.”73 Here a staff of 3000 barbers endlessly pull the perpetually-renewed teeth of the transgressors, one for each lie, every day, forever. “Zucca mihi patria est; opus est hic perdere dentes / tot quot in immenso posui mendacia libro.”74 Indeed, Alcofrybas intimates at the end of Pantagruel (ch. 34) that it will be left up to his giant hero to complete the unfinished task of Baldus and his poet by combating the devils, setting fire to five rooms of hell, throwing Proserpina in the fire and breaking four of Lucifer’s teeth as well as a horn on his arse.

7

Good Giants in Forgery and Pseudo-History

In Rabelais’s time, good giants were most populous in patriotic pseudohistories based on erudite literary forgeries. While the good giants of romance were singletons like Christopher and Morgante, between 1498 and the early 1530s a race of pious, God-fearing giants appeared on the European literary scene. They did not originate in romance, but rather in a learned attempt to rewrite history as told in the book of Genesis. As a result, they had no comic aspects, and, initially at least, no connection to early modern folklore. Instead, they were proposed as the ancestors of European rulers. They were supposedly the descendants of Noah, and Noah himself was proposed as the original good giant. The Noachians were not heroes in the Greek sense, not, that is, simply large humans; instead, they were an absolute inversion of the racial norm.

70 71 72 73 74

Folengo, Baldo, vol. 1, 48–49 (i.e., 2.190–201). Angela Matilde Capodivacca, “The Witch as Muse: Macaronic Fantasy and Skepticism in Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus,” in Folengo in America, ed. M. Scalabrino (Ravenna: 2012), 121–152. Folengo, Baldo, vol. 2, 478–481 (i.e., 25.600–606). “… who invent, sing, and interpret people’s dreams; they have filled books with fables and worthless novelties,” Folengo, Baldo, vol. 2, 480–481 (i.e., 25.608–609). “The pumpkin is my homeland, here I must lose as many teeth as the falsehoods I have put in this immense book,” Folengo, Baldo, vol. 2, 482–483 (i.e., 25.649–650).

rabelais, giants, and folklore

181

Before 1498, the idea of a genealogy of giants was essentially unthinkable: the Pentateuch gave too little information about giants to make their genealogy possible, and no ruler would have been flattered by a genetic connection to these figures. Rulers and cities had frequently traced their origins to Noah in the Middle Ages, but not to Noah the giant. Until Pantagruel, the question of “la généalogie des géants” necessarily centered on these Noachians. The genealogy of the giants first appeared in the same work that introduced Noah the good giant. In 1498, a Dominican friar, Giovanni Nanni (d. 1502), published a collection of eleven forged ancient chronicles with a voluminous commentary. Lopping the initial N off his surname and styling himself Frater Joannes Annius so as to claim descent from an ancient Etruscan gens, he attempted to rewrite the history of the world from Noah’s Flood to the age of Charlemagne. His forged Antiquities75 supposedly restored to the historical record a great volume of information that had previously been lost. Some had been edited out of the Pentateuch by Moses, much more had perished when manuscripts were destroyed, or remained hidden away in neglected libraries and archives. With two exceptions, the forgeries were attributed to ancient authors whose works had been wholly or partially lost; the contents of these books were known only vaguely through brief quotations and paraphrases by later authors. Thus, Annius took it upon himself to re-create what was missing from these fragmentary texts. Annius’s primary pseudo-author was one Berosus, a 3rd-century b.c. historian of Chaldaea mentioned favorably by several ancient authors. His Chaldaica had disappeared except for a few excerpts that were quoted by the 1st-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus to corroborate the historical accuracy of Genesis.76 Annius decided that, using the archives of the Library of Babylon, which he imagined conserving records from near the beginning of time, his Berosus would reveal just how horrible the antediluvian giants were.

75

76

This is a title of convenience; the editio princeps is Commentaria fratris Joannis Annii Viterbiensis super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium (Rome: 1498). Complete publishing history (over 20 variously titled editions, 1498–1659) in Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 344–345 and Stephens, “Discovering the Past,” 66–84. On literary forgery in this period, see Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: 1990), and Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800, ed. W. Stephens and E.A. Havens, with J.E. Gomez (Baltimore: 2018). Stephens, “From Berossos to Berosus Chaldæus: The Forgeries of Annius of Viterbo and Their Fortune,” in The World of Berossos: Proceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on “The Ancient Near East between Classical and Ancient Oriental Traditions”, eds. J. Haubold, G.B. Lanfranchi, R. Rollinger, and J. Steele (Wiesbaden: 2013), 277–289.

182

stephens

In those times there existed near Mount Lebanon the city of Enos the great capital city of the Giants, who ruled the entire world … having invented the use of arms, they oppressed one and all … they invented pavilions and musical instruments and all voluptuous delights. They fed on human beings and cultivated abortions, which they also prepared as food. And they coupled with their mothers, with their daughters and sisters, with other males and with brute beasts. And there was no wickedness which they would not commit, for they were scornful of religion and the gods.77 Nothing in Genesis, and little in classical mythology, could match this concentrated wickedness. Against it, Noah stood out dramatically: There was one among the Giants who was more reverential toward the gods, and wiser than the others. He was the last remnant of the righteous in Syria. His name was Noah, and he lived with his three sons Samus, Japetus, and Chem, and their wives, Tytea the Great, Pandora, Noela, and Noegla. Fearing that future catastrophe which he foresaw from the aspect of the stars, Noah began to construct a ship in the form of a covered box, seventy-eight years before the Flood.78 As a pagan Chaldaean, Pseudo-Berosus can be forgiven for making Noah a polytheist and an astrologer; this was an astute move, for Josephus had misrepresented Berossos, making him confirm Genesis far more closely than a Chaldaean might.79 Annius’s re-creations of lost classics were very brief, only a couple of pages in some cases; but the Antiquities as a whole was quite large, mostly taken up by the long and meticulous commentary, in which Annius craftily interleaved his forgeries with canonical works in the classics and biblical exegesis, adding spurious evidence from inscriptions (most of them forged or non-existent), and reverse-engineering toponyms so as to find evidence of the Noachians’ passage through the landscape of Europe, particularly around Viterbo. (For instance, a locality known as the “onion field” from the word cipolla, became mons Cybellarius, a trace of Noah’s descendant Cybele, who the Greeks later thought was a goddess.) These imaginary ancients then became entries in the origi-

77 78 79

Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 113; Latin text on p. 339. Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 113. On the real Berossos, see Stephens, “From Berossos to Berosus.”

rabelais, giants, and folklore

183

nal genealogy of the giants.80 Thus, for example, where Pantagruel’s genealogy begins with Chalbroth, Sarabroth, Faribroth, and Hurtaly, the first four entries in Annius’s genealogy of the good giants are Noah (alias Janus), Japheth (alias Iapetus), Gomer (alias Comerus Gallus), and Madai (alias Medus). This, of course, represents only one of the three tribes that Noah spawned; in the original genealogy, Ham’s and Shem’s descendants intermarry with Japheth’s in a welter of crisscrossing “begats.”81 Annius’s purpose was to exalt the Etruscans as the favorite descendants of Noah/Janus/Ogyges. Noah’s grandson Comerus was called Gallus, because the word supposedly signified “flood-survivor” in Etruscan, a language that Annius claimed to interpret using his (mostly bogus) familiarity with Hebrew and Aramaic. Annius distinguished these archaic Etruscan Galli from the barbarous Galli novi who sacked Rome in 387b.c. These forgeries drew little attention until Jean Lemaire de Belges used them for the pre-Trojan sections of his Illustrations de Gaule et singularités de Troie, published first in 1511–1513 and in print through 1549. Lemaire undermined Annius’s history in three main ways: he translated them from Latin into French; he transformed the bewildering textand-commentary format into a fluid chronicle that reads like (and indeed is, in part) a romance. These two changes would have eclipsed Annius’s Antiquities on their own, since they increased the forgeries’ audience exponentially, making it possible for people other than scholars to consult, adopt, and modify them. But Lemaire introduced a third change: he simply left out every aspect of the forgeries that exalted the Etruscans and, relying on the traditional definition of Gaul and the Galli, even proposed “Comerus” as a possible alternative to the founder of France identified by Annius; in later 16th- and 17th-century patriotic histories of France, Comerus usurped that title permanently.82 Rabelais evidently found this genealogical, gigantological folderol amusing, as he showed in the prologue to Gargantua:

80

81 82

A complete reading of Annius’s forged masterpiece is in Walter Stephens, “Berosus Chaldaeus: Counterfeit and Fictive Editors of the Early Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1979). Stephens, Giants in Those Days, fig. 13. On Lemaire’s Illustrations de Gaule as reforgery of Annius, see Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 139–184; on Gallus in Annius, Lemaire, and later, Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 147–156; see also Gaignebet, À plus hault sens, vol. 1, 371–374 on Rabelais, Lemaire, and “mythologies galliques,” and, in general, Dubois, Celtes et Gaulois.

184

stephens

Pleust à Dieu q’un chascun sceust aussi certainement sa genealogie, depuis l’arche de Noe jusques à cest eage. Je pense que plusieurs sont aujourd’huy empereurs, Roys, ducz, et papes en la terre, lesquelz sont descenduz de quelques porteurs de rogatons et de coustretz.83 Gargantua and Pantagruel both begin with the genealogy of the giants, crossing the folksy nonsense of the Grandes chroniques, Pulci’s Morgante, and Folengo’s Baldus with the erudite nonsense of Annius, Lemaire, and their imitators.84 Rabelais thereby produced a peerless comic mishmash with a satirical streak. 83

84

oc, 9; cw, 7: “Would to God that everyone knew his own genealogy as certainly, from Noah’s Ark down to this day! I think that many today are emperors, kings, dukes, princes, and popes on earth, who are descended from relic-peddlers and fire-wood haulers.” Stephens, Giants in Those Days, 185–337.

chapter 8

Rabelais and Travel Literature Frank Lestringant

Rabelais crée comme il respire. Mais en revanche ne voir dans son œuvre que voltige et pirouette, ce n’est pas raison.1

∵ What does Rabelais’s world look like? It is the world of the age of discovery. It is at the same time a hermetic world, however, as it remains silent on the Americas and, on a global scale, only features a gloomy archipelago, meant to sustain the most diverse allegories, locating the episode of the “physeter” not far from Wild Island (“Île Farouche”) governed by the Chitterlings. It has been said with some exaggeration that Rabelais had turned his back on the new horizons of his era. The universe inhabited by his characters, the giants Grandgousier, Gargantua, Pantagruel, and their companions, is limited to the medieval space of the quest. Even when they step out of the boundaries of the Chinonais region, where the Picrocholine War is confined in Gargantua, and stray from the shores of France to reach the Caspian Mountains and the regions of the moon, the Perlas Isles, or those of the “Cannibals,” our heroes hardly explore new maritime routes. The sea voyages of the Fourth and Fifth Books, passing by the archipelago of the Western Isles, where voices freeze in midair, where the physeters or “blowers” block the route toward the kingdom of the Divine Bottle, offer greater affinity with the legendary voyages of Saint Brendan than with the recent expeditions of Jacques Cartier or of Roberval. The ocean remains the “dark and gloomy sea” of the ancients, teeming with vaguely diabolical nocturnal life. Even more obviously, Rabelais’s ocean is not without kinship with Lucian’s fantastic sea and his improbable True Histories.

1 Verdun-Léon Saulnier, “Érasme et les géants,” preface to Rabelais, Pantagruel (Paris: 1962), xxix.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_010

186

lestringant

A world without the Americas, a world of islands, such is the world of the Fourth Book then. If there is a map that describes the maritime voyages of Pantagruel and Panurge, it is the Archbishop in partibus of Uppsala Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina et descriptio septemtrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium rerum in eis contentarum diligentissime elaborata, printed in 1539.2 As the episode of the physeter will show, this semi-mythical map of Scandinavia was of service to Rabelais, if not as a literal model, at least as a reservoir of images and words. If Rabelais, like most of his immediate contemporaries, is quite late to recognize the revolutionary influx of knowledge resulting from the great sea voyages, he is nevertheless at his rightful place among the geographical authors of the Renaissance. First of all because his œuvre, similarly to Jules Verne’s much later, is rich in geographical myths, which range from the enclosed world in Pantagruel’s mouth to the “Île Sonante” (Ringing Island), with the double archipelago of the “Papefigues” and “Papimanes” (Popefigs and Papimaniacs), Messere Gaster’s manor on a steep hill, and the icy field of the Frozen Words in between; furthermore, because Rabelais was read as such by voyagers and cosmographers, who, like Thevet in his Grand Insulaire et Pilotage, went to great lengths to refute him.

1

Pantagruel’s Mouth

Rabelais’s world is mobile, full of surprises, and marked by constant change, similarly to the geography of his time. The best-known illustration of this unstable world can be found in Pantagruel 32 (“How Pantagruel with his tongue covered a whole army, and what the author saw inside his mouth”). The episode is reminiscent of Lucian of Samosata’s True Histories. In Lucian’s text, the narrator discovers a new world with mountains, forests, a temple, a fountain, and vineyards in the mouth of a sea monster. However, by the unexpected discovery of the ‘new world’ in the giant’s mouth and by the suggested lesson of relativism, Rabelais links current events, the Great Discoveries, to a popular topic that had already been exploited in the Chroniques gargantuines. The enlarged macrocosm of Columbus and Magellan is forced into the microcosm of an inordinately enlarged body. The ‘other world’ in Pantagruel’s mouth is not exactly an inverted world, even if you can sometimes earn a living by sleeping. It is also and at the same time the repetition or the extension of the world from the 2 Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina et descriptio septemtrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium rerum in eis contentarum diligentissime elaborata. Anno Dni 1539 (Venice: 1539). Copies in Uppsala, Universitetsbibliotek, and Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: 12 Mapp. vii, 1.

rabelais and travel literature

187

‘other side.’ One is the spitting image of the other: they plant cabbage to survive, they die of the plague. However, afflicted by its constituent malleability, this flexible structure, which changes and transforms itself in the course of the replies and the progression of the traveler—in this case the “author” Alcofribas Nasier, anagram of François Rabelais—, represents the ideal no-place where to situate the theme of the relativity of knowledge.

2

The Familiar Topography of Gargantua

Gargantua is a paradox: it is the most modern, the most open of Rabelais’s books and at the same time the most hermetic, the most restricted to a narrowly confined territory. The Picrocholine Wars are located in the region of Chinon. If Picrochole thinks he is Alexander the Great, if he dreams of a new conquest of the world, the Eastern world, of course, he remains in reality within the confines of the Chinonais and hardly ventures ‘beyond.’ Not satisfied by ignoring the recently discovered New World, he limits the war of giants to a few districts: Lerné, Seuillé, La Roche-Clermault. We have to wait for the Fourth Book of Pantagruel to see this closed space open up to the world, a process marked by danger and gloom. Gargantua shrinks the space of Pantagruel, but this restriction allows to reduce the empire of tyrannical Picrochole, alias Charles v, to next to nothing. Afterwards, this space opens up in the following book, the Third Book, which, toward the end, features the praise of the Pantagruelion, a mythical plant used to weave the sails of the vessels and also to smoke as joints. In fact, Rabelaisian space is variable, from the extremely narrow to the vast, from the most confined to the truly universal. Consequently, it is simultaneously narrowly limited and inordinately open. It remains, however, that the map at the basis of Gargantua is narrow and that its widening derives from the act of possible readings: unconventional, allegorical, and even “steganographical.”3 Let us look at the beginning of chapter 33, for example, where Picrochole is subject to his three miserable counselors’ disastrous advice, which enlarges the world map in accordance with his appetite for conquest (pp. 91–93). This map remains nonetheless traditional, it does not go beyond the limits of the conquests of Alexander the Great, put forward by the Duke of Menuail, Count Spadassin, and Captain Merdaille. With Spadassin being placed between Men-

3 As suggested by Mireille Huchon in her paperback edition of Rabelais, Gargantua (Paris: 2007), 14–15.

188

lestringant

uail and Merdaille, we can measure the extent of this carnivalesque degradation. Picrochole’s ambitions are restricted to Europe and near Asia Minor while ignoring the Far East and India, which Alexander had invaded. Picrochole’s fantasy world is ridiculously small; he hardly ventures beyond Mesopotamia, endpoint of his conquests, with the help of the Muscovites. The episode is reminiscent of Lucian’s dialogue Navigium seu vota [“The Ship or The Wishes”], where Lykinos, a man of a certain age, handles irony quite artfully and ridicules his companions for their overly daring talk.4 We recognize prophetic flattery, a parody of Plutarch and a pastiche of Lucian, who already wrote a pastiche of Alexander and went further than his model. In Lucian, we encounter Samippos, who is “from the mainland, an Arcadian from Mantinea,” and who verbally conquers Syria, Caria, “then Lycia, Pamphylia, Pisidia, Cilicia,” before reaching Mesopotamia, Babylon, Ctesiphon, Seleucia, the Caspian Sea, and the Bactrian where he stops.5 As will be the case for Picrochole, Samippus does not venture into India and does not make it to the Indus, as had Alexander. The Pillars of Hercules, which correspond to the Strait of Gibraltar, appeared on Charles v’s emblem, accompanied by the motto “plus oultre.” We could draw a parallel to Guillaume Le Testu’s Cosmographie universelle, a portolan slightly posterior to Rabelais’s death (1556). In this illuminated manuscript atlas, a map of Mexico or “New Spain” shows the Pillars of Hercules shifted westward, toward the Americas, a world where the sun sets. The motto “plus oultre” is seen on two winding yellow banderoles that frame the upright pillars. The Pillars of Hercules jump from one continent to another here, moving westward by the width of an entire ocean. On this map oriented toward the west on top, they are erected on both sides of a two-headed eagle wearing the imperial crown, facing the Pacific, in other terms California.6 Let us recall that Gargantua’s world, unlike the one of the Fourth Book, is not transatlantic; it is confined to and contained in the Old World; it is traditional, limited, Ptolemaic. The New World is entirely excluded. Of course, the Strait of Sevilla, or of Gibraltar, “l’ estroict de Sibyle,” is “passed” by these carnivalesque conquerors, not to cross the ocean and to reach unknown worlds but rather to the contrary, to get back to Europe, a journey back via Africa, via the Old World. As a result, the Mediterranean Sea is rechristened “Picrocholean Sea,” the domain of Barbarossa, a corsair allied with Francis i 4 Lucian, Works, vol. vi, trans. K. Kilburn (Cambridge, MA, London: 1959), 429–487. 5 Ibid., 462–471. 6 Guillaume Le Testu, Cosmographie Universelle. Selon les navigateurs tant anciens que modernes par Guillaume Le Testu pillotte en la mer du Ponent, de la ville françoyse de Grace, ed. F. Lestringant (Paris: 2012), fol. liii v.

rabelais and travel literature

189

against Charles v, and who is summoned by Picrochole and his officers to get baptized and convert to Christianity. We witness therefore a world tucked into the traditional frame of the Mediterranean Sea and the three continents which border it: Europe, Africa, and the Near East of the holy lands. Picrochole is called upon to follow in Alexander’s footsteps, with the caveat that it would be a Gallic Alexander, who would venture out not from Macedonia or from Greece, but from western France and the Touraine region. This diminished Alexander would leave the Touraine and bypass Spain in the direction of the Mediterranean: the Picrocholine Sea makes him circle back toward the Old World, as it does not extend beyond it or enlarge it. It doubles it, plagiarizes it, occupies it, or claims to occupy it anyway. All things said, we are faced with repetition, occupation, or even eclipse. The world that Picrochole claims to occupy is well known. The tyrant is therefore neither a discoverer nor an inventor but a kind of plagiarist. He repeats the daydreams of pedestrian Samippos, who, while walking from Piraeus to Athens, imagines conquering the world, a narrow world, a limited world, an obsolete world. Let us get back to Rabelais: “Le pauvre monsieur du pape meurt desjà de peur” (G 33, 92; cw 78: “Poor Mister de Pope is already dying of fear”). Mireille Huchon underscores the comic addition of the nobiliary particle ‘de,’ which is accompanied by a transparent allusion to the sack of Rome in 1527, as observes Gérard Defaux.7 The pope trembles with fear of the same destiny that his predecessor, Clement vii, had suffered, locked up in the Saint-Ange Castle in Rome, while the lansquenets laid waste to the city.8 Italy is overrun afterwards and put under the yoke, from North to South: “Prinze Italie voylà Naples, Calabre, Appoulle et Sicile toutes à sac, et Malthe avec” (G 93; cw 78: “Italy taken, here are Naples, Calabria, Apulia, and Sicily all sacked, and Malta too”). The conquest continues in a perfectly traditional fashion, without neglecting neither islands nor peninsulas: “De là prendrons Candie, Cypre, Rhodes, et les isles Cyclades, et donnerons sus la Morée. Nous la tenons” (G 93; cw 78: “From there we shall take Candia, Cyprus, Rhodes, and the Cyclades Islands, and fall back on the Morea. We have it”). The conquest of the Peloponnesian Peninsula finishes off a Europe smashed to bits and pieces. Much later, still further East, Picrochole’s counselors accumulate their conquests in the form of a list. They do not use simple geographical names any longer but multiple denominations, for instance two Armenias and soon three

7 Gérard Defaux, in Rabelais, Les Cinq Livres, eds. J. Céard, G. Defaux, and M. Simonin (Paris: 1994), 166, note 11. 8 André Chastel, Le Sac de Rome—1527 (Paris: 1984), 121–160.

190

lestringant

Arabias, happy Arabia, desert Arabia, and Petraea Arabia, the latter designating a frontier province of the Roman Empire, like in André Thevet’s Cosmographie de Levant.9 The accumulation is no longer restricted to simple addition, it drowns in multiplication. The extension of the conquests sweeps the counselors along, all the way to Trebizond, at the far end of the Black Sea. But Xenophon’s Anabase had already made that trip, in the 5th century b.c. The endpoint of Picrochole’s conquests is not India, let us repeat it, but the near regions of Mesopotamia and Syria. He himself, like his counselors, disdains Persia and India; or rather, he ignores India, not to speak of Central and Eastern Asia. Picrochole is unaware of most of Asia and of the mythical Indian subcontinent. He falls back timidly, almost overcautiously, to Mesopotamia and neighboring Syria. He ends up going in circles. At this point, Echephron, the “cautious” in Greek, attempts to curb Picrochole’s zeal and to instill the common sense of Malcon (i.e., Marcoul) by citing distichs from the Dialogues of Salomon and Marcoul, for instance “He who ventures too much […] loses horse and mule, replied Malcon” (cw 80). “Enough!” said Picrochole, “let’s go on” (“passons oultre”). The tyrant’s confusion is reflected in the contradiction between the order to stop (“enough”) and the command to continue (“let’s go on”), the verbal fantasies of conquest. Furthermore, the diminutive “Malcon,” for Marcoul, contains typically Rabelaisian obscene equivocation, which, in this context, both downgrades and rebuilds. The fact remains, however, that Picrochole ignores the warning. By borrowing Charles v’s motto, “passons oultre,” he proves to be just as scatterbrained and unreasonable as Francis i’s rival, according to Rabelais. By repeating this motto after his bad counselors’ discourse, he appropriates their madness. What conclusions can be drawn from this development? The worst seems highly likely. Picrochole will not be reined in, but he will not go very far either. Overall, in Gargantua, cosmography is reduced to a highly traditional geography. It is closely contained within the Old World, even within Europe and is far from upsetting the configuration of the larger world. The confines of the world are unchanged since Plutarch and Lucian. We witness a closed, repetitive, and familiar shape. It seems maddeningly redundant.

9 André Thevet, Cosmographie de Levant (1556), ed. F. Lestringant (Geneva: 1985), 160.

rabelais and travel literature

3

191

Rabelaisian Utopias: From Thelema to the Ringing Island

Rabelais’s writings display numerous connections to Thomas More’s Utopia. Badebec, Gargantua’s wife and Pantagruel’s mother, is the “daughter of the king of the Amaurots in Utopia” (P 2, 140). As for Pantagruel, he is the king of the Utopians. Rabelais conceived of his own version of a utopia: in Gargantua, the Abbey of Thelema is a Utopia on firm geographical grounding, located in the Touraine region, “next to the Loire river, two leagues from the great forest of Port-Huault” (G 52, 116). But Thelema is less reminiscent of a republic than of a convent. It is actually a new type of monastery whose only rule is “Fay ce que vouldras” (G 57, 149; cw, 156: “Do what you will”), as insinuated by the meaning of the Greek term θέλημα, will or desire. This utopia has no maritime or insular aspects. It turns its back to the ocean, as does geography on the whole in Gargantua. This peculiar geography is in truth a chorography rather than a topography, as we will see below.

4

The World in Panurge’s Beard (Third Book 28)

In the course of Panurge’s consultations dealing with the worried trickster’s eagerness to know whether or not he will be beaten and cuckolded by a future wife, a disorganized cosmos is taking shape. A vertiginous example can be seen in chapter 28 of the Third Book, “How Frère Jean comforts Panurge about his fear of cuckoldry.” The chapter responds to the two preceding ones, “How Panurge takes counsel of Frère Jean des Entommeures” (26) and “How Frère Jean joyously advises Panurge” (27). The euphoric terms of the initial blazon of the bollocks offered by Panurge are quickly countered by the dysphoric ones that characterize Frère Jean’s counter-blazon; similarly, the positive interpretation of the sound of the bells of Varennes-sur-Loire, near Saumur, is followed by a negative reading. On the threshold of chapter 28, at the pivotal moment of this turnaround, Frère Jean compares Panurge’s graying hair to a world map. The focus shifts quickly to his salt-and-pepper beard as we move almost imperceptibly from his balding head to his shaggy beard:10

10

Paul J. Smith analyzes this passage in “Landscape and Body in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel,” in The Anthropomorphic Lens: Microcosmism and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts, eds. W.S. Melion, B. Rothstein, and M. Weemans (Leyden: 2014), 67–92, esp. pp. 74–76.

192

lestringant

Desjà voy je ton poil grisonner en teste. Ta barbe par les distinctions du gris, du blanc, du tanné et du noir, me semble une Mappemonde. Reguarde icy. Voy là Asie. Icy sont Tigris et Euphrates. Voy là Afrique. Icy est la montaigne de la Lune. Voydz tu les paluz du Nil? Deçà est Europe. Voydz tu Theleme? Ce touppet icy tout blanc, sont les monts Hyperborées. Par ma soif mon amy, quand les neiges sont es montaignes: je diz la teste et le menton, il n’y a pas grand chaleur par les valées de la braguette. tl 28, 438

[cw 339–340: Already I see the hair on your head graying. Your beard, by its shadings of gray, white, tan, and black, seems to me a world map. Look here: there is Asia; here are Tigris and Euphrates. There’s Africa; here are the mountains of the Moon. Do you see the marshes of the Nile? On the near side is Europe. Do you see Thélème? This sheer white tuft is the Hyperborean Mountains. By my thirst, my friend, when the snows are in the mountains, I mean by that the head and chin, there is not much heat in the valleys of the codpiece.] A comparison from the Greek geographer Ptolemy, translated by the Dutchman Peter Benewitz, alias Peter Apian, through the juxtaposition of images (“Geography” and “Its Similarity;” “Chorography” and “Its Similarity”) suggests the equivalency of the description of the earth and the depiction of the human face—a glum and bearded face like Panurge’s.11 Given that Peter Apian’s Cosmography, soon to be enlarged and completed by Gemma Frisius, proved to be a bona fide bestseller of geographical literature in the 16th century, with over 60 editions prior to 1600 distributed all over Europe, one can legitimately assume that Rabelais had this image in mind when composing these passages for the Third Book.12 In The Self-Made Map, Tom Conley suggested the parallels between Apian’s engraving and the analogy that Frère Jean proposes. Conley observes that Panurge is quick to replace Apian’s well organized world, to which Frère Jean alludes, with a myriad of details, a catalogue of specific localities. In the process, he juxtaposes an image of the world, i.e., a coherent imago mundi, with a myriad of unrelated, random peculiarities. He obtains an

11

12

See Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World. The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery (Cambridge, UK: 1994), plate 2. See also my Écrire le monde à la Renaissance: Quinze études sur Rabelais, Postel, Bodin et la littérature géographique (Orléans: 1992), 52–54. Pierre Apian, La Cosmographie (Anvers: 1544), fol. iv r.

rabelais and travel literature

193

incoherent mix instead of an atlas, a fragmented chorography instead of a coherent geography.13 Although Apian’s first engraving that attracts Conley’s attention shows the full, proportioned head of a person, in other words a face in profile, young, handsome, bearded, and carefully combed, reminiscent of Apollo or rather Christ,14 other editions of the Cosmography display, on the same topic of geographical “similarity,” the shaggy and half-bald head and disheveled beard of an older and quite unkempt man. The “geography” on display does no longer distinguish the three continents designated by their respective names, “lasie,” “lafrique,” irrigated by the vertical line of the nile, with the three branches of the stream soon to be united, visible toward the top, upriver; furthermore, below the almond-shaped island of Méroé, and finally, bottom right, tiny “europe,” while just above “la mer oceane” unfolds on a large scale, at the summit of a sphere that shows the geographical south at the top. So, we are faced with a rough and unrefined world map, without captions, where the continents are hardly recognizable. Europe is enlarged at the expense of Asia, and a shrunk Africa is confined to the south, toward the top and to the right of this image of the world that is simply sketched out or maybe reproduced from memory. The same observations apply to the column of “similarities” in the right margin of the engraving. The crumpled and badly cared-for face is on the brink of breaking up and dissolving into one eye and one ear when the second engraving on the page, just underneath the first, places side by side (and no longer one above the other), facing the “Chorography” and its neglected landscape, a slanted tree to the right and pushes the city toward the heights. It is tempting to assume that Frère Jean—and above all Panurge—has before his eyes not the well-defined, regular, or in other words Apollonian, version of the engraving representing “Geography” but rather its neglected, Dionysian, and almost caricatured version, which is close to breaking up and dissolving into the contrasted undulations of the “Chorography.” Apian clearly intended to distinguish between different scales of cartographic representation. Ptolemy, the father of geography, considered four scales or dimensions of size to measure the world, ranging from the largest to the narrowest vision, from a far off to a very close viewpoint: cosmography, geography, chorography, and topography. Cosmography is the mathematical description of the world following the heavenly spheres; it represents the small13

14

Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: 1996, 2010), ch. 5, “An Insular Moment: from Cosmography to Ethnography,” 167–201, esp. pp. 170–174. Conley, The Self-Made Map, 171.

194

lestringant

est scale and the most abstract level. Geography, which is also attached to the general description of the world, considers, for its part, the earth according to its internal structures and divisions, oceans, seas, and mountains. Chorography and topography, finally, survey the earth from a closer and almost myopic perspective. As chorography and topography tend to merge, Apian ends up keeping only the opposition between general geography and local chorography. Hence the double graphic equivalency: geography, representing the roundness of the globe by depicting the large continental and oceanic masses, must be put in relation with the portrait of an entire head, a shaggy and bearded male head; chorography, however, which zooms in on and singles out a certain region, island, or city, a steep hill or a mountain and its river, would correspond to the depiction of an eye or an ear dissociated from the whole.15 Chorography therefore becomes similar to a surgical procedure, the Greek verb apotemnomai being applicable to both domains.16 By giving a literal illustration of the Ptolemaic metaphor, Apian creates an involuntarily surrealist image whose pedagogical effectiveness is nonetheless undeniable. This image actually allows to ascertain de visu that, just as it is easier to isolate in a face an eye or an ear than the forehead, the chin, or a cheek, certain aspects of the general physiognomy of the earth are easier to mark out than others. Hence, in part, the fate that the Renaissance, following in the footsteps of antiquity, will reserve for two types of cartographical objects that were cut out in advance so to speak and thus ready-made for chorographical recension: the island and the city. The outlines of both appear at once neatly delineated against the neighboring territory. It is fairly unimportant in this context that the limits of an island are natural and that the borders of a city are most often due to the work of man. The essential aspect is to be found in the organic character of the unit that is delivered as such to the scalpel of the chorographer. On one side, we would therefore find the “insularii” or “insulars,” which are “books of islands,” atlases exclusively made up of maps of islands, and on the other, “polygraphies” or books of cities, albums of casual views assembling the major cities of the known world.

15

16

Fernand Hallyn, Gemma Frisius, arpenteur de la terre et du ciel (Paris: 2008), 80–84, observes a homology between cosmographical and pictorial discourse in the Renaissance, associating them with quantity and quality, while relying on the double patronage of Euclid and Quintilian. Christian Jacob, “La Mimésis géographique en Grèce antique: Regards, parcours, mémoire,” in Sémiotique de l’ architecture: Espace et représentation, penser l’espace (Paris: 1982), 53–79 (57).

rabelais and travel literature

5

195

Reading the Beard

Does Rabelais refer to the head in its entirety or the beard only? To a certain extent, one can discern both in the words that are put in Frère Jean’s mouth, as the monk is quick to abandon Panurge’s head in favor of his smooth and thick beard. Frère Jean enjoys treating this beard in the same manner in which a cosmographer would while contemplating a map unfolded on a table or displayed on the wall of his cabinet. Similarly to the tip of his compass, his finger designates a series of regions or locations under consideration. Deictics lend order to his demonstration: “Reguarde icy; Voy là; Icy sont; Icy est; Voydz tu; Deçà est,” etc. The fibrous texture of Panurge’s beard appears strikingly similar to the canvas or the paper on which the images of the world are painted or printed. Just like Peter Apian’s, the world map that Frère Jean deciphers in Panurge’s beard is of the most traditional bent. The Americas are being ignored and we only see the three continents of the Old World; they are listed in the following order: Asia, Africa, and Europe. The order is both hierarchical and geographical: the description originates in Asia, which is the largest, noblest, and richest continent according to the geographers from antiquity; then, it directs its gaze toward Africa, which is basically restricted to the regions irrigated by the Nile—Ethiopia in the broadest sense and Egypt—, and it finally terminates in Europe, the most negligible of the three continents and also the poorest when it comes to remarkable natural and human phenomena. This classic image of the earth, marked by oriental tropism and the centrality of the Mediterranean, is devoid of the Americas, of course. As mentioned above, the New World is excluded from the Rabelaisian cosmos. Although the definitive version of the Fourth Book dates from 1552, it does not contain a fourth, transatlantic continent either but various island-dwellers inhabiting the margins of the known world of the Ancients.17 Rabelais’s world is therefore the Old World surrounded by islands, the restricted world of traditional cosmography centered on the Mediterranean, on Apian’s world of three continents. This geographical model, where every continent is characterized by its most remarkable geographical elements, displays one anomaly, however, Thelema, the Rabelaisian creation of an abbey coming out of nowhere. As Mireille Huchon observes in her edition, “La mention de Thélème est hétérogène par rapport aux indications du relief données pour les autres continents.”18 And yet, Thelema, seemingly impossible to locate, is well inscribed into the texture of the world inherited by the

17 18

I have briefly mentioned the peculiar case of the “island” of Canada above (ql ii). Rabelais, tl 28, 1419, note 4 referring to p. 438.

196

lestringant

Ancients, somewhere in old Europe, most likely in France and very possibly even in the Touraine region. A similar world map is drawn up by the praise of the Pantagruelion (tl 51). Through a frequent paradox in humanist geography, the closed world of the ancients, the narrowly circumscribed world of Diodorus of Sicily and of Pliny the Ancient is linked to the praise of modern sea voyages. As if nothing had happened since then, Ceylon and Scandinavia define the limits of an ecumene restricted to Eurasia enlarged by a part of Africa. Not the slightest trace, yet again, of the Americas or the Far East: Icelle [herbe] moyenant, par la retention des flots aërez sont les grosses Orchades, les amples Thalameges, les fors Guallions, les Naufz Chiliandres et Myriandres de leurs stations enlevées, et poussées à l’ arbitre de leurs gouverneurs. Icelle moyenant, sont les nations, que Nature sembloit tenir absconses, impermeables, et incongneues: à nous venues, nous à elles. Chose que ne feroient les oyseaulx, quelque legiereté de pennaige qu’ilz ayent, et quelque liberté de nager en l’ aër, que leur soit baillée par Nature. Taprobana a veu Lappia: Oava a veu les mons Riphées: Phebol voyra Theleme: Les Islandoys et Engronelands boyront Euphrates. Par elle Boreas a veu le manoir de Auster: Eurus a visité Zephire. tl 51, 508

[cw 408: Thanks to it by retention of the waves of the air, the stout cargo ships, the ample cabined barges, the mighty galleons, the ships holding a thousand or ten thousand men, are launched out of their stations and driven forward at the will of their commanders. Thanks to it, the nations that Nature seemed to keep hidden, impenetrable, and unknown, have come to us, and we to them: a thing the birds would not do, whatever their lightness of wing and whatever freedom is given them by Nature for swimming in the air. Taprobrana [Sri Lanka, once Ceylon] has seen Lapland; Java has seen the Riphaean Mountains; Phebol shall see Thélème; the Icelanders and Greenlanders shall see the Euphrates. By it Boreas has seen the manor of Auster; Eurus has visited Zephyros.] Generally speaking, the imprint of the great sea voyages is minimal in the Third Book, and even in the Fourth Book, and the presence of Jacques Cartier or of Jean-François La Roque de Roberval—the “Robert Valbringue” from the Fifth Book (3, 734; cw 619)—remains furtive, despite Abel Lefranc’s claims to the contrary. The only novel term in this entire page of cosmographic praise is not taken from the seafarers’ cartography, it is yet again the Greek term Thelema,

rabelais and travel literature

197

a utopian place, a non-place. Thelema, the imaginary abbey founded in honor of Frère Jean, also designates God’s will or man’s natural will. The ideal of the Renaissance is thus inscribed in this geography inherited from the Greeks and Romans, as it features the emblem of will or desire, in the form of a topographical anomaly.

6

Panurge Topographer

To return to Frère Jean’s description of Panurge’s beard, we see the transition from cosmography to topography, from an aerial and global dimension, where the earth appears geometrical and level, to a vertical dimension with depth. The monk’s description ends up descending from Panurge’s head and chin to his codpiece or, more precisely to the “valleys of the codpiece” (tl 28, 438; cw 340). It descends the length of Panurge’s body. The mention of the Hyperborean Mountains prepares this descent. Furthermore, the change in temperature accompanies the move from high to low, from the top to the bottom. Finally, the most striking aspect remains the modification of the scale, or rather the distortion of the scales; from a general overview of the world, the description gradually slips into the relief mode of close details focusing on mountains and valleys. Reinforcing and at the same time contradicting Frère Jean’s account, Panurge accentuates the downward movement of the passage for he descends all the way to the leek, a plant with roots in the earth and whose head is buried in the soil while the green cane (“tail”) extends toward the sky: “Tu me reproches mon poil grisonnant, et ne consydere poinct comment il est de la nature des pourreaux, es quelz nous voyons la teste blanche, et la queue verde droict et vigoureuse” (tl 28, 438; cw 340: “You reproach me with my graying hair, and do not consider how it is in the nature of leeks, in which we see the head white and the tail green, straight, and vigorous”). This crude and colloquial expression cannot help but recall the Platonic image of man as an inverted plant, with the roots stretching to the sky and the branches pointing toward the earth. Rabelais knew this image well and exploits it in the allegory of Antiphysis in the Fourth Book (32, 614–615; cw 507). In his trademark carnivalesque fashion, Panurge appears to parody this famous Platonic myth, as it was developed in the Timaeus before becoming widespread (“mille fois repris ensuite par Philon le Juif et par les pères de l’Église, par Hugues de Saint-Victor et par Bovelles”19).

19

See Lionello Sozzi, “Physis et Antiphysie, ou de l’ arbre inversé,” Études de lettres 2 (1984):

198

lestringant

True to the guiding principles at play in the Third Book, Panurge attempts to reverse Frère Jean’s arguments in order to distill from his demonstration a positive outcome and a diametrically opposed conclusion. This technique of the contradictory dialogue manifests itself in this instance in the quick succession of the blazon and the counter-blazon that structures chapters 26 to 28. They consist of Frère Jean’s litany of the bollocks, first positive, then negative; laudatory then pejorative. These antithetical twin blazons of the male body respond ironically to the blazons of the female body that were in fashion precisely in the second half of the 1530s, since the famous competition launched by Clément Marot from his exile in Ferrara.20 The two testicles of the male anatomy symbolize so to speak the two interlocutors of this exchange, as Guy Demerson observes not without humor: Frère Jean cannot exist without Panurge, and neither can Panurge without Frère Jean. On the whole, Frère Jean paints with large strokes a general geography or picture of the world, to which Panurge opposes a particular, more restricted topography. Wherever Frère Jean is depicted as a generous geographer, Panurge poses exclusively as a topographer and as a finicky topographer at that. We remember that, at the beginning of the Third Book, he “attached spectacles to his bonnet” (7, 277) as a sign of his deliberate myopia. Consequently, the geographical ekphrasis that Frère Jean draws from Panurge’s beard provokes the latter’s response by a local comparison: “Quand la neige est sus les montagnes, la fouldre, l’esclair, les lanciz, le mau lubec, le rouge grenat, le tonnoirre, la tempeste, tous les Diables, sont par les vallées” (tl 28, 438; cw 340: “When the snow is on the mountains, the lightning, the thunderbolts, the leg ulcers, the pocky sores, the thunder, the storms, all the devils are in the valleys”). To the cosmographic laws of the world seen from above and sub specie aeternitatis, which is not only a panoramic and rather global view of the earth but also, simultaneously, a global apprehension of History, from the origins to the end, Panurge, a resolutely myopic Panurge, opposes the topographical law of the relief, which links cooling to higher altitudes rather than to the general withering of the universe. He immediately offers a concrete illustration that underlines his intrinsically topographical logic: “En veulx tu veoir l’ experience? Va on pays de Souisse, et consydere le lac de Wunderberlich, à quatre lieues de Berne, tirant vers Sion” (tl 28, 438; cw 340: “Do you want to see this by experience? Go to Switzerland and consider Lake Wunderberlich, four leagues from

20

123–133; “Quelques aspects de la notion de dignitas hominis dans l’œuvre de Rabelais,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 167–174. Mireille Huchon, in Rabelais, oc, p. 1416, note 1 for p. 432.

rabelais and travel literature

199

Berne, on the way to Sion”). This is either the Thoune Lake or the Schwarzsee, surrounded by high mountain ranges a few miles from Berne in the direction of Sion.21 The changing scale, switching from the global sphere to the topographical fragment, from the world map to the Lake Wunderberlich, is apparently accompanied by a questioning of the equivalence of macrocosm and microcosm. But Panurge is not at all prone to paralogical reasoning when he turns snow on mountaintops into a symptom contradicting the heat in the valleys: such a deduction, although surprising to us, is first and foremost an illustration of the principle of antiperistasis, cherished in Aristotelian physics, that is to say the capacity of one body to awaken and exalt the contrary quality of another body in close proximity.22 It is the phenomenon of antiperistasis that explains why water in a well is cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, why northern peoples are hot-blooded whereas inhabitants of the south are colder and melancholic, as Jean Bodin observes among others.23

7

The Body and the World as Paintings

As for the distortions that affect the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm in Rabelais’s writings, a significant change occurs as we move from the first two books, Gargantua and Pantagruel, to the Third Book: the text is no longer concerned with the reality of the analog cosmos but with its metaphorical representation; no longer with its physical existence but with its verbal image. We remember that the narrator, Alcofribas Nasier, actually penetrates into the mouth of his hero Pantagruel (P 32)—at least that is what he claims as it is a “true history” in Lucian’s ironic fashion. This is where he discovers a world that hardly merits the designation of “new,” as it is the spitting image of the old world: peasants plant cabbages, sentries watch over the cities’

21 22

23

See the note in J. Céard’s edition of the Tiers Livre, p. 268. Antiperistasis is “l’ action de deux qualités contraires dont l’une sert à rendre l’autre plus vive et plus puissante” (É. Littré). On the use of this medical notion in humanist critical and ironic discourse, see Terence Cave, Pré-Histoires: Textes troublés au seuil de la modernité (Geneva: 1999), 35, who suggests the following definition: “une sorte de thérapie par contraires qui consiste à faire passer l’ esprit par une phase de trouble épistémologique, pour qu’ il retrouve ensuite l’ ataraxie.” Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), suggests the following definition: “A mutuall, or generall cohibition, compression, or repulsion of humors, &c. whereby they become the stronger, and the more strongly possesse the parties they are in.” Lestringant, Sous la leçon des vents: Le monde d’André Thevet, cosmographe de la Renaissance (Paris: 2021), 281, 286, 290.

200

lestringant

gates, asking strangers for their pass for fear of the plague (P 32). In a similar fashion six pilgrims are actually swallowed in a salad by the good giant in Gargantua. The latter then extracts them with a toothpick before inundating them with his urine (G 38, 104–106). By contrast, the world appearing in Panurge’s beard in the Third Book is only drawn up by imagination, by Frère Jean’s inventive and truculent verve, as the monk describes his friend’s beard at the same time as he combs and pities it. In the Third Book, Rabelaisian fiction thus leaves the realm of the gigantic and the marvelous characteristic of chivalric novels and tall tales in favor of a more realistic context. This does not mean, however, that Rabelais abandons the “novel of proportions,” to employ a term that applies to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, albeit in a somewhat different manner.24 He merely resituates it on the level of representation. One indication of this shift is the fact that the world is no longer in the hero’s mouth but in his beard, thus at the exterior and the bushy surface of the body rather than in its secret depths. This, in a nutshell, is the difference that separates the world in Panurge’s beard from the “world in Pantagruel’s mouth”.25 In this kind of “surface world” (as opposed to an “in-depth world”), all outside with no inside dimension, it is impossible to penetrate or circulate physically. Consequently, there are no more adventures to be encountered, no more risk of being crushed or drowned, contrary to the fate of the six unfortunate pilgrims from Gargantua. At the most, it is possible to “read” this world, with complete peace of mind and body, as one would any other world map or sphere. Let’s keep in mind that, contrary to Pantagruel and Gargantua, Panurge is not a giant but a regular human being, of a height slightly superior to the average. This is a concrete reason why his body would be unable to enclose an entire world, to shelter cities and fields in his throat, to conceal in the depths of his body infernal chasms and abysses. At best, he can sustain, due to his bearded surface, a miniature world, the pretense of a world, devoid of density and depth, rather than a viable world that would allow for traveling and visiting for months or even years on end. His body merely functions as a surface to be inscribed: on his face and in his beard, similarly to a painting or a blank page, one is free to read or to project whatever one wants, depending solely on the fertile imagination of the beholder. Consequently, the variant of the world in Panurge’s beard illustrates less the analogy of macrocosm and microcosm than it parodies it. 24 25

Jonathan Swift, Œuvres, ed. E. Pons (Paris: 1965), 1622, note 1 for p. 136. See Lestringant, Le livre des île: Atlas et récits insulaires, de la Genèse à Jules Verne (Geneva: 2002), 347–351. This is the title of chapter xi in Erich Auerbach’s seminal study Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton: 1968), 262–284.

rabelais and travel literature

201

It denounces the arbitrary nature of a collage such as the one we observe in Apian’s Cosmography, which puts two images next to each other with the claim of proving an analogy by the mere juxtaposition of two objects: sphere and head, rock and ear, world and man. Such a visual device has undeniable pedagogical merit but hardly proves anything, as it relates to the physical reality of the analogy thus exposed to the beholder. It is moreover an excellent support for the discourse of those who would exploit it in contradictory fashion, a convenient aide-mémoire, or rather a localized reminder, even an art of memory, whose fortune and multiple uses during the Renaissance are well-known.26 In the Third Book the cosmographic bodies of the first two books are thus replaced by cosmographical representations, signs, tables, and discourses associating the two worlds, the “small” one and the “large” one. As arbitrary as they may seem, these representations are nevertheless instructive as to the psychology and the morals of the characters that transport them. Let us repeat that whereas Frère Jean encompasses the world and its creatures from a global perspective, Panurge descends on the localized topographical level. He brings everything back to his own insignificant character, which he would like to establish as an exception from the general laws of physics, a hapax defying the universal regularity of secondary causes. Immediately after reciting the dysphoric litany of the bollocks, Frère Jean concludes his discourse by underlining Panurge’s pride, this hubris which incites him to attempt to resist, all by himself, the laws governing all creatures, even the stars and the spheres of heaven: Couillonnas au diable, Panurge mon amy: puys qu’ ainsi t’ est praedestiné, vouldroys tu faire retrograder les planetes? demancher toutes les sphaeres celestes? propouser erreur aux Intelligences motrices? espoincter les fuzeaulx, articuler les vertoilz, calumnier les bobines, reprocher les detrichoueres, condempner les frondrillons, defiller les pelotons des Parces? Tes fiebvres quartaines, Couillu. Tu ferois pis que les Geants. tl 28, 441–442

[cw 345: Ballock away to the devil, Panurge my friend, since it is so predestined for you; would you make the planets reverse their course? all the heavenly spheres go off track? propose error to the Moving Intelligences? blunt the spindles? slander the bobbins? reproach the reels? condemn the spools for spun thread? unwind the skeins of the Fates? A tough quartan fever to you, ballocker! You’d do worse than the Giants.]

26

Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: 1966).

202

lestringant

We know from mythology that these giants attempted to unseat the gods by climbing onto Olympia during their sacrilegious revolt. By refusing the destiny of a cuckolded and beaten husband, Panurge jeopardizes the entire celestial mechanism that presides over man’s destiny. To begin with, this celestial “machine” is described in astronomical, i.e., cosmographical, terms: planets, celestial spheres, and moving intelligences. Frère Jean then moves on to the mythological register of spinning, via an allusion to the three Fates who spin, unwind, and cut the threads of human destiny. Two episodes of the Third Book have been connected on the grounds of their resemblance: Frère Jean’s aforementioned description of the world in Panurge’s beard, on the one hand, and, on the other, the author-narrator’s praise of the Pantagruelion, this fantastic plant that abolishes frontiers and distances while allowing man to penetrate into the outermost fringes of the earth. The two episodes, in chapters 28 and 51, share the same cosmographic vision of the world and the same opening of the compass enlarged to the extreme. Both also inscribe the name of Thelema inside the universal frame, and more precisely into the cosmographic structure of the world where such a place name is deemed an intruder. Now, both, because of Thelema or as Thelema indicates, or yet as Thelema wishes—the meaning of the moral toponym Thelema, wish or desire—, end with the threat of generalized disturbance. Immemorial order is replaced by sudden disorder, in which the cosmos appears to get irreparably damaged. In fact, one should distinguish between two kinds of disorder, the “bad” and the “good” kind so to say. The former type is triggered by the actions or the words of an individual of ill will, in our case Panurge, who attempts to go against general customs for his own personal profit; the latter type is produced by humanity on the whole in its irresistible movement toward constant expansion. The first, prey to the capriciousness of philautia, never hesitates to defy the divine order of time, the second monopolizes space and drives back the gods who climb back onto Olympia out of fear to be chased from their sacred abode soon. But we are not faced with a blasphemous climb, even if man ends up going all the way to the moon.27 The space outside the law of maritime “peregrination,” which Panurge faces near the end of the book (tl 47), enables him to escape from philautia. Such an opening insinuates that Panurge has given up on his chorographic myopia in order to go back to the heights of

27

tl 51, 509, ed. J. Céard, 467. See my reading of this episode in “Rabelais, Polydore Vergile et ‘la fascination des commencements’,” in Esculape et Dionysos. Mélanges en l’honneur de Jean Céard, eds. J. Dupèbe, F. Giacone, E. Naya, and A.-P. Pouey-Mounou (Geneva: 2008), 727–740.

rabelais and travel literature

203

cosmographic vision, indispensable for any long voyage and consequently the voyage of life itself.

8

From the terraquée Ball to the Fourth Book

We are faced with the problem that the transition from the sphere to the map is imminent. As soon as one approaches the surface of the water, during a long sea voyage, one abandons the bird’s eye view for the surface perspective. Our glance regains earth or rather reaches sea level, lodged in-between the islands of the universal archipelago. Earth is no longer seen from afar, in its totality, more geometrico, but in all its details, from just above the waterline, from island to island. In fact, our travelers move from island to island in the Fourth Book, their interminable voyage leading them all over the archipelago. They travel from one island to the next with no endpoint in sight and no resolution apparently within the realm of possibility. There is no more view from a distance, nor from a higher vantage point. The superior, over-arching viewpoint is forever lost, no more glances from a distance where reality would come neatly together, where the real would be summed up in a narrowly defined vanishing point in space. The Fourth Book starts out quite well, however. In chapter 1, “How Pantagruel put out to sea to visit the oracle of the divine Bacbuc,” we meet the head pilot, Jamet Brayer, who had already “mapped out the route and set the needles of the compasses” (cw 438–439). The voyage would follow the parallel due west instead of passing Africa by the Cape of Good Hope. In chapter 2, we hear about the island of Medamothi, all littered with lighthouses, and whose circumference “was no less great than that of Canada” (439). The ports of call would soon accumulate without further details. What ocean are we on again? To what destination are we headed? Let us repeat that the Americas are not mentioned at any time. Canada, which gets the passing mention already discussed, is an island, at best a circular island that can be festooned with lighthouses, it seems. Other than that, the stages follow in quick succession without the possibility of locating them on a parallel or a meridian. The tempest (ql 18–22) leads to a land of the dead, the island of the Macraeons, which is the next stage. It ends in tragic fashion, with the reminiscence of the death of the great All, the god Pan of the Christians, i.e., Christ: “Pantagruel, on finishing this statement, remained in silence and profound contemplation. Shortly after, we saw the tears flow down his cheeks, big as ostrich eggs” (ql 28, 498). But thereafter, “the ships of the joyous convoy were renewed and repaired” (ql 29, 498), the voyage continues, and the stages accumulate

204

lestringant

yet again, toward the west, the north, or maybe the north-west, without any more geographical precision. Some locales are merely seen from afar, such as Coverup Island (“l’île de Tapinois”), “which was ruled by Fastilent” (“Quaresmeprenant”) and where our travelers are wary of landing (ql 29). Xenomanes’ comments on this monstrous ruler fill three chapters with anatomical analogies, internal and external body parts, and other physical features, which make it unnecessary to explore this creature in any more detail (ql 30–32). It follows the episode of the physeter, a sea monster that can be seen on Olaus Magnus’ Carta marina and that Pantagruel harpoons relentlessly (ql 33–34). One outcome of this battle is the call on Wild Island (“l’ île Farouche”), realm of the troublesome Chitterlings (“Andouilles”), who quickly mount an ambush against the Pantagruelists. It follows an enigmatic combat which sees Pantagruel triumph yet again (ql 36–42). Next up is the island of Ruach, and finally the double episode of the Popefigs and the Papimaniacs (“Papefigues et Papimanes”), the latter being strongly influenced by the Gallican crisis (ql 45–47; 48–54).28 An allegorical reading of the archipelago of the final books of the series seems the most promising. The unstable world of the first Pantagruel and of Gargantua tends to freeze in these later instalments, similarly to the frozen words on the high seas toward the end of the Fourth Book. Contrary to the expanding world of the earlier books, these islands are enclosed systems, without any mouths or other openings. The most representative in this respect is the “admirable” island of Messere Gaster, “first master of arts in the world” (ql 57, 560), which resembles the rock of Virtue that Hesiod describes in his Works and Days. Its coastline is virtually inaccessible, its slopes rocky and steep like those of Mount Aiguille in the Dauphiné, but if you overcome these obstacles, you will find a “mountaintop so pleasing, so fertile, so healthy and delightful, that I thought it was the real earthly Garden of Paradise” (ql 57, 560). But let us proceed in order.

9

Going Ashore on the Island of the Papimaniacs

The island of the Papimaniacs is one of the most developed and most spectacular geographical allegories of the Fourth Book, and one of the most openly polemical ones, too. The fiction of the voyage of discovery is linked to a the-

28

On the Gallican crisis in this episode, see Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophète. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua et Le Quart Livre, (er) 32 (Geneva: 1997), 455–515.

rabelais and travel literature

205

atrical device, the guided tour being combined with a dialogue of characters whose function is both didactical and polemical. The opening chapter, “How Pantagruel went ashore on the island of the Papimaniacs” (ql 48) is the one most clearly attached to travel literature, which it parodies. Some saw in it a “tale of a first encounter,” others a topos, of the rowboat, of the landing, or of the port of call;29 others yet a particular rite within a more general ritual edifice;30 and some others, finally, an exemplary “heterotopia.” The story of the sea voyage, which adopts an uncommon consistency at this point, progresses from enigma to enigma, from revelation to revelation. This trajectory of discovery is marked by repeated errors and misunderstandings, which are only partially rectified in the course of the text. The topos of the stopover, with all the accompanying details of the actual landing, appears all the more remarkable as there are few such occurrences in the Fourth Book and even those are not very developed. The framework of the island is established with precision from the beginning. The seafarers approach the island in calm weather. This calmness of the air and the sea corresponds to the prosperity of the “blessed island of the Papimaniacs” (ql 48, 540) and thus functions as a harbinger of its status. In this respect, the island of the Papimaniacs offers a perfect contrast to the one of the Popefigs that the travelers had just visited. The two islands, one sterile, the other fertile, form a pair, a pair of contrasts, symbolizing other opposing dichotomies such as heresy and Catholicism or distress and worldly prosperity. As for the ritual dimension, it is clearly sketched out by the theological substrate of the episode, consisting in a series of gestures and attitudes implied by an underlying ceremony: words of welcome, exclamations, kneeling, procession, kissing of feet, rituals of thanksgiving. This island heterotopia—the realization of a utopia according to Michel Foucault’s terminology31—enables Rabelais to depict a radical alterity on the basis of which he can provoke both outraged questioning and laughter. The device of heterotopia favors an ironic approach, the reversal of the obvious, and alternate viewpoints. The first scene of the episode features the four estates in the vessel: monk, falconer, supplicant of legal proceedings, and wine grower from Orleans, who represent, respectively, the clergy, the nobility, the legal pro-

29 30

31

For a listing of these travel-related topoi, see Arlette Fruet, Les voyageurs d’îles: Sur la route des Indes aux xviie et xviiie siècles (Paris: 2010). In this perspective, see the study of Normand Doiron, “Les rituels de la tempête en mer: Histoire et voyage au seuil de l’ âge classique,” Revue des sciences humaines 214.2 (1989): 44–70. Michel Foucault, Le corps utopique: Les hétérotopies, ed. D. Defert (Paris: 2009), 23–25.

206

lestringant

fession, and the commoners. Attired and decked out according to their status (frock, military gown, judicial sacks, billhook), these personifications of the four estates constitute society as a whole in its structure and hierarchy. The hierarchy is implied, in fact, by the order of presentation: the enumeration follows a descending progression, from the clergy to the nobility, the representative of the law, and finally the commoner, summing up society in those four characters. The four estates are placed on a boat here, or rather on a barque (“un esquif”), which is a very light vessel. It is tempting to assign an allegorical meaning to this construct: the four estates, i.e., society as a whole, are drifting on the high seas. Water, after all, is the incarnation of an unstable element, as we are reminded by an emblem that Gilles Corrozet, in 1540, inserts into the Hecatomgraphie, a collection of one hundred emblems in the style of Alciato. The emblem depicts “The unstable world.” It shows a man standing on a floating island in the midst of a choppy ocean. In his right hand, he holds a globe topped by a cross while he maneuvers with a pole in the other hand. Above the engraving a quatrain explains the moral allegory: Le monde en une isle porté Sur la mer tant esmeue et rogue, Sans seul gouvernal nage et vogue, Monstrant son instabilité.32 The four estates assembled on a barque at the mercy of the waves could well have a moral sense quite similar to Corrozet’s in Rabelais’s text, possibly as an emblem for the earthly city as opposed to the city of God. The sea is likely the sea of worldly temptations. One has only to think of the coat of arms of Paris and its motto: “Fluctuat nec mergitur.” Eloquent image, striking allegory: the four estates’ barque is certainly less solid and more instable than the Pantagruelists’ vessel, which had come through the tempest and is about to venture into the polar sea, where the cold is so intense that words freeze in midair. It is also true that they do not venture this far. Instead of undertaking a long voyage, they are content, without leaving the harbor or running any risk, to meet our travelers, whom they call “gens passagiers” (cw 540: “travelers”) and “gens peregrins” (ql 48, 649; “pilgrims,” not translated in cw). Contrary to Corrozet, Rabelais initially only provides the “body” of the emblem, not its “soul,” the image, not the text. Hence the enigmatic nature of the image, presenting a riddle that will only be resolved a few pages later, in an

32

Gilles Corrozet, Hecatomgraphie (Paris: 1540).

rabelais and travel literature

207

aside that Pantagruel addresses to the ship’s boy who responds that “these were the four estates of the island” (ql 48, 541). The delayed explanation causes the readers’ heightened attentiveness and underlines the dynamic nature of the story. It also contributes to its dramatic structure, similarly to the exchange of questions that follows and that is also left without answers initially. Ironically, the volley of questions that are fired at Pantagruel and his companions from the moment of their arrival teach them more than the most detailed answers could have. These questions, or rather that one and only question that comes up repeatedly (“Have you seen him you travelers? Have you seen him?”) constitute yet another enigma, the second one after the image of the four characters in the barque. And this new enigma covers up a scandal which is about to be exposed. One must insist on one important detail: the scene is told from the perspective of the questioned party, not of the questioning party, a point of view identical to the one on the last page of Montaigne’s essay “Of the Caniballes.” The parallel between Rabelais and Montaigne is instructive here, as the two episodes are related. They both subscribe to the topic of stories of landings. The Pantagruelists just dropped anchor in the harbor of the Papimaniacs; the Brazilian cannibals, in the fall of 1562, arrive in Rouen, the main port of Normandy, where they encounter the young king, Charles ix.33 Pantagruelists and cannibals discover a world that had hitherto been unknown to them, respectively Papimania and France. It is surprising then that these ignoramuses, these naïve travelers—falsely naïve in truth—are being interrogated in an urgent manner in order to provide essential answers. In both episodes, the question triggers another one via a kind of boomerang effect. Just as the cannibal questioned in Rouen responds himself by three questions, one of which was lost due to Montaigne’s feeble memory,34 the question repeated by the Papimaniacs immediately gives rise to the next one: “Who?” asks Pantagruel, which then is echoed by Frère Jean: “Who’s he?” Apparently misjudging the situation but, in reality, seeing through the Papimaniacs’ scheme, the monk adds: “Ox death, I’ll clobber him!” (ql 48, 540) This battle of questions, this game of interrogations leads up to a dangerous truth, exactly as it will in Montaigne. If the questions clash and bounce from one to the other, it is because there is something unspeakable behind them. There is certainly an element of misunderstanding, as is evident in Frère Jean’s calculated error, referring to the pope

33 34

Montaigne, Essais, i, 31, “Des Cannibales,” eds. P. Villey and V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: 1965), 213– 214. The English title is from Florio’s 1603 translation. Ibid., 213.

208

lestringant

while pretending to think that his interlocutors “were inquiring about someone guilty of robbery, murder, or sacrilege” (ibid.), which corresponds quite well to the Holy Father’s image in Lutheran circles. But more importantly, we encounter here the forbidden, the illicit. In Montaigne, the scandal has two causes: first, the very foundations of society, with a child-king ruling over adults; then social inequality, which causes the poor to die of hunger at the doorsteps of the rich. In Rabelais, it is the pope’s secular monarchy, the work of an impostor, that is criticized. Through the agency of the cannibal, Montaigne denounces a double scandal, both political and economic; Rabelais, for his part, is inspired directly by Luther here and stigmatizes, via his spokesman Pantagruel, a case of religious imposture. The Pope makes people worship him in lieu of God, exactly like the antichrist announced in the second epistle to the Thessalonians 2, v. 3–4: “Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he take his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.” The Papimaniacs, who have made the Pope their “God on earth,” as confirmed by canon law, fall therefore prey to the sin of idolatry. The decisive difference that lies between the true Christian and the idolater of the pope is the profession of faith that Pantagruel retorts to the four estates: “The One Who Is, replied Pantagruel, by our theological doctrine, is God. And in these words He declared Himself to Moses. Certainly we have never seen Him, and He is not visible to bodily eyes” (ql 48, 540). Pantagruel recalls here how “God the Father revealed himself to Moses at the burning bush as pure Being: i am that i am—in Latin, ‘I am he who is’; in the Septuagint version, ‘I alone am the Being-one’, I alone truly exist”35 (Ego sum qui sum in the Vulgate). He thus reduces to nothing any other form of deity and to the state of imposture any other cult, including papal idolatry. But the indefatigable and obstinate questioners reply: “We’re not talking at all, said they, about that high God Who reigns in the heavens. We’re talking about the God on earth. Have you ever seen him?” Like Rabelais, Panurge has seen three popes, the Papimaniacs’ god on earth, “three in succession, one after another” (ql 48, 540–541), to be precise. It follows the Papimaniacs’ enthusiastic reaction: “O thrice and four times happy people, said they, pray be welcome and many times over, welcome” (541). Kneeling and prostration are next. The Papimaniacs want to kiss their feet but our travelers refuse. They explain that this treatment is solely reserved for

35

Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (London: 1979), 404–405.

rabelais and travel literature

209

the pope, which triggers their hosts’ fervor as they explain that they would go much further if they actually met the pope: “We’d kiss his ass with no figleaf, and likewise his balls.” And they express a maxim which they call straight out of the Decretals: “He is pope so he has balls. And if the world ran out of balls, the world would have no more pope” (ibid.). After that, everybody, including our travelers, goes ashore, where they are met by the entire population of the country, “as in a procession.” The four estates announce that their guests had seen him, and everybody kneels down with their hands put together, crying out: “O happy people! O most happy people!” All of a sudden, Pantagruel gets very angry when he sees the schoolboys being whipped “magisterially” by their pedagogues and threatens to leave immediately. The Papimaniacs’ reaction leads us back to our topic, as we will see: “The people were astonished at hearing his stentorian voice, and I saw a little hunchback with long fingers asking his schoolmaster: ‘Power of the Extravagantes! Does everyone who sees the pope grow as big as this one who’s threatening us? How incredibly I can’t wait to see him, so as to grow as big as this one!’” (ql 48, 541–542) We remark the verb “to see” in the first person singular, a formula of examination employed ironically by Lucian in the True History and which appears frequently in the Fourth Book, for instance in the episode on the island of Ruach (ql 43). The verb forcefully bears witness to the denunciation of papist idolatry in our episode. These observations bring us back to the subject, as this is not only a topical formulation of travel literature, stressing the authority of sight and its wellknown supremacy over the other four senses, and obviously also over hearsay. It is also a solemn attestation that dramatizes the geographical fiction of this episode and conveys gripping depth to the action. Rabelais commits himself and takes a stand in this satire of the Church of Rome and of papist idolatry.36 In order to express a first-person viewpoint, Rabelais uses what appears to be a negligible circumstance, which incorporates, for the only time in this episode, the device of comic gigantism. The irony consists in the fact that, much like Lucian’s formula in True History, the formula of attestation is called upon to confirm an obvious implausibility: the giant’s “stentorian” voice supposedly gives credence to the belief that it is the consequence of a papal miracle. As for the role of the Papimaniacs’ bishop, the text is clear. Homenaz (“Grosbeak”), whose name signifies in Provençal a strong and stupid man, used here 36

On the topic of religious satire, see Screech, L’ Évangélisme de Rabelais: Aspects de la satire religieuse au xvie siècle, (er) 2 (Geneva: 1959), 77–86, and Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007), 161–171.

210

lestringant

as a caricature of pope Jules iii, who is in conflict with king Henri ii, arrives on a mule clad in green, and announces that “one of their hypophetes, a degreaser and glossator of their holy Decretals, had left it in writing that even as the Messiah, so much and so long awaited by the Jews, had come to them at last, just so to this island some day the pope would come” (ql 48, 542). Christians are nowhere mentioned here; instead, we hear about the Jews of the old alliance who obstinately refused to recognize Jesus as the Son of God and the Messiah announced by the prophets.37 What is more, Homenaz mentions “their hypophetes,” an expression that the Brief Declaration defines as follows: “who speak of things past as prophets speak of future things” (bd 602). A “hypophete” is therefore an ‘inverted’ prophet, looking toward the past instead of the future, keeping his gaze obstinately fixed on the old alliance instead of turning it toward the new one. Notwithstanding Guillaume Budé and the passage from his De asse that Gérard Defaux quotes in support of his interpretation,38 there can be no doubt that the term has negative connotations here, even caricaturing prophets as it reverses our expectations of the function of prophecies. It appears that one of the benefits of travel literature in the case of Rabelais is that its exoticism renders his criticism more daring while allowing him to preserve a certain measure of transparency. In this episode, Roman Catholics are doubly guilty according to Rabelais, as they are idolaters and obstinate Jews. Such is the true state of the Roman religion: a mixture of paganism and Judaism. There is certainly nothing evangelical or Christian in it. Hence the final excuse of the Pantagruelists, more horrified than polite: “However, we politely excused ourselves from this” (ql 48, 542). True Christian honesty cannot tolerate such blasphemy and even less such a constant stream of blasphemies. The most scandalous part of the chapter’s polemic is that it functions as a vivid illustration of what it denounces: the chapter forcefully shows in its true colors the Papimaniacs’ idolatry and Judaism. The readers assume the role of spectators of this terrible imposture, in this case the contagious jubilation that welcomes the so-called Messiah or at least his involuntary couriers who announce his imminent arrival, couriers, in fact, who will quickly be critical of and revolted by the spectacle in which they participate without their consent. We witness a parody of the adventus Dei, a diabolical spectacle that the entire chapter puts on display.

37 38

This point needs to be corrected in Defaux’s edition of the Quart Livre (Paris: 1994), ch. 48, note 37, p. 490. Ibid., p. 490, note 35.

rabelais and travel literature

10

211

Venturing onto the Island of the Papimaniacs (ql 49–54)

Even before attending mass, the travelers notice a large, gilded book attached by two thick golden chains to the lintel of the temple gate and look at it admiringly. Thanks to his size, Pantagruel is the only one capable of touching and handling it. His reaction is a telling reinforcement of the episode’s polemic that also announces Homenaz’s violent harangue in favor of complete annihilation of all “heretics” (ql 53, 552):39 “And he asserted that at the touch thereof he felt a gentle itching in his fingernails and new life in his arms, together with an urgent temptation in his spirit to beat a sergeant or two, provided they were not tonsured” (ql 49, 543). Homenaz goes on to explain that the sacred Decretals that they see suspended above their heads were “written by the hand of an angelic cherub […] and miraculously transmitted to us from the heaven of heavens” (ibid.). If the visitors wanted “to see and kiss them inside,” the ritual would have it that they “fast for three days in advance and make confession regularly” and “scrupulously.” It is hardly surprising that the Pantagruelists prefer attending mass without further delay and then have lunch. Following the “Small talk during dinner in praise of the Decretals” (51), chapter 52 (“Continuation of the miracles occasioned by the Decretals”) recounts the visitors’ numerous tales of misfortune befalling those who abuse of the Decretals. Homenaz intersperses their tall tales with formulaic outbursts of loathing accentuating the Papimaniacs’ utter lack of caritas: “Divine punishment […] and vengeance;” “Vengeance […] and divine punishment” (ql 52, 549). For the fanatical bishop, all is well that ends well, as the Decretals’ virtue is amply demonstrated, and he can exclaim righteously: “A miracle! […] Cleric, bring a light here [Clerice, esclaire icy, 662], and note down these fine stories” (ibid., 551). This ridiculous reaction does not prevent Frère Jean from aiming a gibe at these “new heretics” in the form of a satirical quatrain; alas it almost provokes him to do so, and he decomposes the term “Décrétales” into “Décrets” and “ales” in the sense of “wings”: “Depuys que Decretz eurent ales, / Et gensdarmes porterent males, / Moines allerent à cheval, / En ce monde abonda tout mal” (ql 52, 662; cw 551: “Since first Decrees had wings, / And soldiers boxed their things, / Monks had their horse to ride, / And ills spread far and wide”). Needless to say that the gist of the gibe escapes Homenaz, who applies it to the heretical adversaries of the Decretalists. The final two chapters of the sequence put the finishing touches on this polemical episode. Chapter 53 (“How by virtue of the Decretals gold is subtly

39

See the chapter on satire in the present volume.

212

lestringant

drawn from France into Rome”) revisits the paradoxical praise of the Decretals from the perspective of Gallican politics. Chapter 54 (“How Grosbeak gave Pantagruel some good-Christian pears”) contains a subtle play on the expression “good Christian,” which, in Italian dialects, signifies a simple man, even a simple-minded man, and particularly a German. The term evokes Luther’s most ferocious anti-papal pamphlet, “Vom Papstum zu Rom vom Teufel gestiftet” [Of the papacy in Rome, founded by the devil] peppered with scatological expressions and images.40 This is the ironic ending of our heroes’ stop on the “blessed” island of the Papimaniacs, chapters that push the anti-papal polemic to its limits, “véritable brûlot anti-papiste dans la crise gallicane des années 1550 et 1551.”41 The episode demonstrates the satirical potential of travel literature, profiting from its eccentricity and its exoticism; hence its place in this inventory of Rabelaisian travel writing and its functions.

11

Stopover on the Ringing Island [L’Isle Sonante]

The chapters of the Ringing Island form the initial episode of the Fifth Book. The papacy is again at the center of the criticism, as it is denounced once more as a usurping power, whom the four estates of society obey unconditionally. The strange world of the Ringing Island is a world dominated by bells, which are also configured as cauldrons, frying pans and cooking-pots, in which the pope’s thick, fatty soup is cooking. The image is reminiscent of a satirical engraving of Protestant inspiration, Le Renversement de la grande marmite,42 from the same year (1562) as the initial publication of L’Isle Sonante. We see an upside-down bell, cracked and overflowing with soup, in which float miters and crooks and which boils over a fire fueled by the bodies of three martyrs of the Reformation. Springing up from the heavens, the allegorical figure of Truth, armed with the sword of the Holy Scriptures, knocks over everything. The anti-world of the Ringing Island, inhabited by birds named “Clerkhawks, Monkhawks, Priesthawks, Abbothawks, Bishawks, Cardinhawks, and Popehawk, who was one of a kind” (cl 2, 617), denounces, one after the other, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the new orders, the chivalric orders—especially their commanderships (“commanderies”) of “gourmanderies” (cl 5, 736; cw 622)—, 40 41 42

Screech, “Introduction. Sagesse de Rabelais: Rabelais et les ‘bons christians’,” Rabelais en son demi-millénaire, 9–15; here p. 13. Huchon, oc, p. 1465. Paris, BnF, Cabinet des Estampes, Qb 1 (1585). Reproduced and commented in Lestringant, Le Huguenot et le sauvage, 3rd ed. (Geneva: 2004), 420–448.

rabelais and travel literature

213

greed, gluttony, laziness, and lust that dominate the papal court. It is the receptacle of all the residue from our world, the overflow reservoir where the poor and the destitute send their surplus children, i.e., the lowliest and the disgraced, the “hunchbacked, lame, one-armed, gouty, disfigured, deformed,” or, as Homer’s saying summarizes, “a useless burden upon the earth” (cl 4, 620 [Iliad, 18.1–4]). The Ringing Island also represents the world of the dead, a sterile world without procreation, without culture, and without renewal, a world that only grows by destroying the other world. This is the reign of the tyranny of the pope, who burns, strikes, fulminates, and exterminates: If he once hears you blaspheming this way, you’re ruined, good folk: do you see a basin here in this cage? Out of this will come thunder, lightning bolts, devils, and a tempest, by which in a moment you will be plunged a hundred feet underground. cl 8, 629

Master Aeditus, the Pantagruelists’ interlocutor, does not fail to evoke fanatical Homenaz in such passages, but the satire seems even gloomier than in the previous book. Consequently, the Fifth Book’s perverted world, a true inferno, is frightening rather than inducing laughter, and we will encounter it a few years later in an important cartographic fiction, published in Geneva in 1566, La Mappe-Monde nouvelle papistique.43 Created by the Italian Jean-Baptiste Trento and the Frenchman Pierre Eskrich, La Mappe-Monde nouvelle papistique constitutes a cosmographical allegory of the Catholic Church, just like L’ Isle Sonante of 1562. Like the actual Ringing Island from the eponymous episode, this monstrous world is situated in Hell, and more precisely the mouth of the disproportionately enlarged devil. At this moment in time, the acts of vomiting and swallowing, far from expressing the euphoria of an expanding world, conjure up fear and the desire of the apocalypse. Geography is henceforth firmly at the service of satire. The text of L’Isle Sonante can be linked to a series of seven anonymous drawings attributed to the drawer and painter Baptiste Pellerin.44 An eighth drawing,

43

44

Jean-Baptiste Trento and Pierre Eskrich, Histoire de la Mappe-Monde Nouvelle Papistique, eds. F. Lestringant and A. Preda (Geneva: 2009). Cf. Lestringant, “Le gouffre et l’atlas, ou la cosmographie infernale de Jean-Baptiste Trento et Pierre Eskrich: La Mappe-Monde nouvelle papistique de 1566,” bhr 69 (2007): 561–588. See my study, “ ‘L’ Isle sonante’ et la sphère du monde: À propos de sept dessins de ‘drôlerie’ attribués à Baptiste Pellerin,” in Illustrations inconscientes: Écritures de la Renaissance. Mélanges offerts à Tom Conley, eds. B. Renner and P.J. Usher (Paris: 2014), 93–119.

214

lestringant

of unknown origin, is most likely linked to this series and shows the frontispiece of the Isle Sonante. The drawings are from the 1560s, a decade during which Reformation propaganda resorts readily to images, as demonstrate large engravings such as the aforementioned Renversement de la grand marmite (1562) and the Mappe-Monde nouvelle papistique. All these texts have in common the violent criticism of the papacy that thinks of the entire world as its subject. One of the seven drawings resembles strongly a scene from the Ringing Island episode, either from the eponymous 1562 text or from the ‘definitive’ Fifth Book (1564). It represents an allegory of the Catholic Church, with the clergy transformed into an aviary (cl 2, 731–732; is 2, 845).45 The birdcages are surmounted by bells. In the center of the drawing, at the foot of the uppermost cage, a hooded guide, maybe Master Aeditus, instructs the three voyagers, possibly Pantagruel, Frère Jean, and Panurge. It is tempting to identify the vessel to the left, resembling a caravel, as Pantagruel’s boat, from which our travelers had just disembarked (cl 6, 738). The hospitality, with which the travelers are welcomed, is represented by the banquet table to the right, where we see three platters of food. Standing in front of his guests, the potbellied hooded character raises his cup, which lets us imagine a scene where Master Aeditus salutes Pantagruel, Frère Jean, and Panurge (ibid., 739). The scene of rest under a tent, to the left in the forefront, might well illustrate the beginning of the following chapter (cl 7, “How Panurge tells Aeditus the fable of the charger and the donkey”). After all, the inhabitants of the Ringing Island spend their days and their nights eating and drinking. The increasing violence of religious satire finds fertile ground in travel literature during this first decade of the French Civil Wars, and even Agrippa d’Aubigné will make use of motives from the aforementioned drawings and engravings in his Tragiques as well as in L’Histoire universelle.

12

Conclusion

The Fifth Book contains some Rabelais but is not by him. Or at least, it is not put together according to his design. Everything stops therefore, everything ends in the middle of the ocean at the end of the Fourth Book. There is no more quest, no more progress toward the west or the north-west. The overabundant enumerations, the disorderly parataxis of the different stages stop in mid-ocean, too. So, what do we get out of Rabelaisian travel literature and

45

Cf. Dominique Cordellier, “Sept dessins de ‘drôlerie’,” Grande Galerie. Le journal du Louvre 16 (2011): 8–9. See Lestringant, “ ‘L’ Isle sonante’ et la sphère du monde,” illustration 1, 113.

rabelais and travel literature

215

its various episodes and anecdotes? At this point, it is tempting to take them up again, to mix them up, or, on the contrary, to put some of it aside and to gloss them to one’s own personal benefit. Everyone for oneself, to each their own reading of Rabelais. This is exactly what the Huguenots are doing as early as in the 16th century. What they retain from Pantagruel’s feats are the episode of Panurge’s sheep, the description of Quaresmeprenant who governs Coverup Island, Wild Island and the Chitterling War, also the episode of the Frozen Words, and above all, of course, the colorful and ferocious satire of the Papimaniacs. Or one could go back to the analogy that Frère Jean establishes in the Third Book. What transforms Panurge’s head into a world, admittedly fading, but nonetheless whole, with the notable exception of the New World, of course? Is this “world-head” a simple joke or an image that we should take literally? Even then it would be necessary to situate ourselves on the general and far-removed scale of cosmography or geography and avoid adopting immediately the closer, more restricted scale of chorography, the “particular description of a place.”46 Everything is summed up in and comes down to a head. Very quickly, however, this head breaks up into pieces: an eye or an ear that float on the page or drift on the ocean, following the currents with no endpoint in sight. Translated by Bernd Renner 46

Conley, The Self-Made Map, 171.

chapter 9

Rabelais and Theatre Jelle Koopmans

1

Liminary Note

If Rabelais, instead of writing his Pantagruelic novels, had published farces and sotties, he would most certainly have been considered one of the greatest comedy playwrights in history. He never published, however, any comical play under his name, and none of the ones that have come down to us can be easily attributed to him1—which does not imply necessarily that he never wrote one, several, or even more, nor that none of the extant texts have been written, be it partly, by him, nor that he may have been actively involved, e.g., as an actor, in any of these productions. Here, we should also keep in mind that the best dramatists keep their repertories to themselves or to their troupes. There is no Rabelais’s First Folio, but it could very well have been produced. However, it seems improbable that it could have been, which does not mean the possibility of its discovery, one day, can be totally excluded. And one could take a second to imagine what could be a farce by Rabelais, but the extant farces do have their qualities after all, and are pretty close, in their way of imagining the world, to its depiction in the novels of maître François. And, of course, Rabelais claims or confesses to have been one of the actors in the moral comedy of The Man who Married a Dumb Wife.2 He would have played in this farce in his days as a student at the famous Faculté de Médecine in Montpellier; he has at least one of his characters state that a certain François Rabelais, amongst others, played a part in it. He has Épistémon give a full summary of the farce, which he calls a patelinage, before Panurge says: “Retournons à nos moutons,” which is of course a quote from The Farce of Maître Pathelin. Naturally (with Rabelais 1 Of course, we enter here into questions of the logic behind attributions, but let us not forget that Pathelin has been attributed, on few solid grounds, to Villon, and later on to Triboulet, the fool of René d’ Anjou, and that both attributions remain problematic. However, the problematic nature of the attribution does not prove they were not, or could not have been, the author of this text. See e.g., Bruno Roy, L’ hypothèse Triboulet (Orléans: 2009). Rabelais’s authorship of certain farces and sotties, however, cannot be excluded. 2 tl 34. Anatole France will reconstruct this comedy in 1908 and Heinrich Sütermeister will turn the plot into an opera buffa: Seraphina oder die stumme Apothekerin (1959); the ‘théâtre de figures’ of Saint-Gall has used Sütermeister for a puppet theatre production.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_011

rabelais and theatre

217

one never knows) this may be a fictional set-up, but it has all verisimilitude to it. The documents about student theatre have not yet been fully exploited, but a first glance at archival records shows that, indeed, the involvement of medical students in farce-playing is nothing but normal.3 Someone like Rabelais could not have been anything but an active farceur, one would say—even if that activity is documented nowhere outside of his own work, which is in se of course a risky documentation. In the early days of the 16th century, according to Thomas Sébillet, everyone (I could also translate: ‘anyone’) wrote farces—and that tends to show that farce playing went well beyond the rare collections of texts that have survived.4 In a way, the matter of “Rabelais and theatre” amounts to something like the question of any modern Parisian author and the métro, of course, but not everyone is as explicit as Raymond Queneau on it.5 For any Parisian, however, the métro is a reality, even when it is not included in the text. But what is there to say about a presence which is in fact an absence? Speculation is free and pleasant, but it is time to turn to a more specific source of documentation: Rabelais’s novels. Like Raymond Queneau’s obsession with the Parisian métro, Rabelais has a constant obsession with the theatre practice of his days. His texts are replete with dramatic references, his language is close to that of farces and sotties, his spirit is clearly and radically farcesque, his characters are also, in a way, personnages, the stories he relates could have been farces, and his dialogues are farcesque or modelled upon the sottie technique. Next to that, Rabelais expresses a clear knowledge of the practice of religious theatre all over the French kingdom and beyond, and he certainly knows what is going on in street art, ‘les arts de la rue,’ alongside the strictly dramatic performances. In many of his references he follows the style and formulation of the chronicles of his days—which is not all that astonishing as he claims overtly to write chronicles.

3 Charles d’ Aigrefeuille, Histoire de la ville de Montpellier (Montpellier: 1737), 235, quotes a document citing, in 1502, “plusieurs farces, tant par médecins que par autres enfants de la ville”; Alexandre Germain, “La Renaissance à Montpellier: Étude historique d’après des documents originaux,” Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Montpellier 6 (1871): 1–156, mentions performances in 1530, 1531, 1532, 1534; see also Geneviève Dumas, Santé et société: Montpellier à la fin du Moyen Âge (Leiden-Boston: 2015), 409. 4 It is important to note that the chances of survival or conservation of a drama text, be it as manuscript or as printed edition, were highly limited, and therefore the core of what we have, for shorter, worldly. i.e. secular, plays, are the texts which were integrated into collections, in other words, bound together as early as the 16th century. The central question of what the extant corpus really represents has never systematically been addressed. 5 See Queneau’s 1959 masterpiece Zazie dans le métro.

218

koopmans

Earlier studies on Rabelais and theatre have mainly been concerned with the ‘what,’ but the ‘how-and-why’ as well as the ‘where-and-when’ are otherwise interesting, as they can furnish certain keys to the explanation of Rabelais’s texts, not only on the level of footnotes and simple details, but also on the level of the general design of his novels. Textual criticism of Rabelais turned to farces and sotties in order to explain passages in Rabelais, often based on second-, third-, or fourth-hand knowledge of the theatre of his days; textual criticism of worldly, i.e. secular, plays often turned to Rabelais’s text to explain obscure passages, by just quoting the useful part and without seeing the drama references in Rabelais in their proper function (from an internal point of view, i.e., their meaning in Rabelais, as opposed to an external point of view focusing on their meaning for theatre history in general). It cannot be denied that, in Rabelais’s work, the theatrical culture of his days is everywhere, but theatrical culture does not designate in all instances theatre as we know it, in the sense of institutionalized ritual within a building constructed to that effect and called, therefore, theatre. Rabelais’s first novels predate the ‘glorious’ restauration of antique comedy and tragedy (around 1550, with Jodelle’s Eugène, seen as the first regular comedy, and with Jodelle’s Cléopatre captive, seen as the first regular tragedy). This means that in fact, Rabelais was unaware of what ancient theatre would come to mean for French literature, but he did have a certain knowledge of the drama of antiquity. It also means that the reality of performance, for Rabelais, must have been a world of farces, mysteries, and moralities, and even though literary history has it that these genres are medieval, most of the extant texts date from the 16th century. However, his theatrical world consisted also of mountebank entertainment, quack shows, joyous entries, processions, and many other events, often erroneously called para-theatrical activities.6 This implies that there is, at the outset, a sort of a historiographical problem. In that, we should not forget that where modern theatre historiography has held the radical position of the restoration of theatre to the dignity of ancient comedy and tragedy—as certainly some humanists claimed in their programs, many humanists went about things in a different manner, in trying to ensure retrospectively the dignity of French genres. Thus, many translators, such as, for example, Jacques Amyot, surreptitiously introduced farces into Roman culture, but this tendency already existed in Raoul de Presles’s 14th-century translation of the City of God. Rabelais himself, in tl xix (cw, 312), does exactly the same when he introduces

6 The term ‘para-theatrical’ is dangerous from a historical point of view as it sets a certain ‘classical’ or ‘modern’ concept as the norm.

rabelais and theatre

219

a “joueur de farces,” a farce-player, in the days of Emperor Nero. This retrospective view on ancient theatre from the perspective of 16th-century dramatic culture, has not yet been systematically investigated, but we clearly have here a lead to another view on the development of drama, which tends to invalidate the traditional views on the humanist rediscovery of classical comedy. In fact, the movement went two ways: from Roman comedy to 16th-century renovation, but also from 16th-century practice to a reinterpretation of Roman times. At the same time, this view clearly shows the duplicity of 16th-century humanism: on the one hand, there was a tendency to restore ancient comedy to its dignity, professed from the late 1540s onward; on the other hand, there was a reinvestment of the past with ‘our’ contemporary farce. And the sentiment that farces really are typically French, and that they are something to be proud of, is a constant feature in 16th-century writings about theatre, where even those who distanced themselves from this old genre, recognized its typically French nature. There is something highly curious about this double position, and Rabelais, as ever, was right at the center of it.

2

Theatre Practice at the Base of Rabelais’s Novels

To start with a simple overture: Pantagruel, the hero who gave the title to the first novel, is in the French mystery plays the name of a nasty little devil, who charges his wings with ocean salt during the night in order to sprinkle it in the throats of the drunkards, who sleep with their mouth open (as I am informed …). That is why, on waking up, they all say that the pantagruel has taken them by the throat; hence the thirst theme, congenital to the name of Pantagruel. This little nasty mystery devil is to become the good giant in Rabelais’s first novel; the mother of all devils in some mystery plays is Proserpina—for good mythological reasons, and there we find a link to the theme of fertility—and fertility is part of the world of Bongouverne, whereas thirst is part of the world of Maugouverne. Through that, we enter the world of the carnivalesque and the multiple Maugouverne-societies, which were responsible for the organization of festivities, but at the same time we should not forget that the carnivalesque Maugouverne is also, in a play of mirrors, actual government. The ridiculous “prince des sots,” who is of course just the monarch of fools, is also simply the actual monarch; the topsy-turvy world or mundus inversus illustrated in many plays, and also in many rituals, plays, and the like, is also the image of the real world: things have turned into their contrary, reality is nothing more but the contrary of what it should be. From the first sotties, passing through Erasmus and ending in Rabelais’s work, that specific aspect of ‘parody,’ that side of rit-

220

koopmans

uals of inversion, has been high on the list. Rabelais is the first to use the term “morosophe” in French, and the Bongouverne—Maugouverne opposition is not only about anthropological rites of passage but also, clearly, about the humanist interest in government—as education and government were high on the humanist agenda, and in Rabelais’s first novels, the two themes are well served. But before getting into those wide perspectives, let us return for a moment to Pantagruel. The little nasty mystery devil became a good giant. That transfer is already highly interesting as it shows how Rabelaisian imagination works. Embedded as it were in the culture of the time, the theme gets a new twist in Rabelais. This twist is highly innovative, and also very interesting from a more conceptual point of view as it also shows how Rabelais bases his first novel on the culture of dramatic performance, and—one is to expect—also on the visual memory of his readers (as we are to suppose that the mere mention of “Pantagruel” rang a bell for the public). Beyond that, it accounts for the theme of thirst and drinking—as it does for the theme of the throat. And, of course, Gargantua, Pantagruel’s father and hero of the second novel, is pseudo-etymologically related to the throat (que grand tu as); yet another playful reference is the name of Gargantua’s father, Grand-Gosier, who was already a character in a farce printed around 1515 in Paris, and even gave his name to it.7 This means that, instead of simply enumerating theatrical references in Rabelais, we should also consider how and why theatre is essential to his novelistic endeavor in a broader sense. He is, in a way, trying to put theatre into a chronicle. This type of expansion—getting from a simple reference to something broader, replacing this broader notion subsequently in a much larger framework leading to a retro-interpretation of it all—is one of the most typical sides of Rabelais’s way of integrating the theatrical world into his work. For ‘things theatrical’, this needs also to be placed in a larger context.

3

Theatre, a Problematic Notion

Theatre, in the 16th century more than in the modern period, was about man in representation, as theatre was not yet confined to the building constructed to this use, but was an open category, in a way also a new category. Theatre was also simply ‘play’ ( jeu) and hence one of the preoccupations of Huizinga’s

7 Jelle Koopmans (ed.), Le recueil Florence: 53 farces imprimées à Paris vers 1515 (Orléans: 2011), nº xv, see 230, where the function of the indication “Grand Gosier” on the title page is explained.

rabelais and theatre

221

Homo ludens.8 The medieval reinvention of theatre was not built on models from antiquity, but in the late 15th century already, these models were present, known, and studied; regular comedy or regular tragedy did not exist in France—neither on a textual level nor on the level of performance, but someone like Rabelais must certainly have known about it.9 Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, in translations of Latin texts and in Roman histories, a term such as farce was systematically used to describe Roman theatre practice. What was called theatre included wandering troupes (and they were professionals from the 15th century onwards10), but also the practice of students in their colleges, and next to that, the municipal organization of entries and local festivities. The Church was also heavily involved in the organization of many theatrical activities. Through this short sketch, the reader is invited to abandon too strict a view on what theatre is, can be, should be, or has been. Theatricality in Rabelais’s days is in a way far removed from our modern concepts. And that, naturally, determines our perspective on theatre in Rabelais. His characters are not just characters stemming from traditional categories such as comedy and tragedy, but also, as it were, ‘stage’ quacks, ‘bonimenteurs,’ jesters, fools (as in the fools’ plays or sotties), and hundreds of other theatrical worlds apart from the traditional view of what ‘drama’ should be. The rebirth of theatre, in the meaning the ancients gave to it, and maybe also the Church fathers, was in statu nascendi; many performances we would call nowadays ‘theatre’ were not conceived as such, and many forms of activities, which we categorize nowadays as ‘para-dramatical,’ may very well have been at the heart of the ‘dramaticity’ of the period. In short, the perspective should necessarily be broad.

8 9 10

Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture (Boston: 1955). See for instance one of the first occurrences of the term “Tragicque comedie” in French, tl, prol., 349; cw 256. On early professional theatre, see Katell Lavéant and Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, “S’associer pour jouer: Actes notariés et pratique théâtrale (xve–xvie siècles),” in Le Jeu et l’Accessoire. Mélanges en l’ honneur du professeur Michel Rousse, eds. M. Bouhaïk-Gironès, D. Hüe, and J. Koopmans (Paris: 2011), 301–318 and Walter Prevenier, “Quand un honorable bourgeois de Malines, ‘marié avec une bonne et honeste femme’, s’encanaille dans une troupe de théâtre en marge de la bonne société (1475),” in La permission et la sanction, eds. M. BouhaïkGironès, J. Koopmans, and K. Lavéant (Paris: 2017), 141–163.

222 4

koopmans

Earlier Scholarship

The topic ‘Rabelais and Theatre,’ evident as it is or as it may seem, has in a way been hijacked by a famous article Gustave Cohen wrote about the subject in the Revue des études rabelaisiennes in 1911.11 Cohen, still unaware of all the new findings he would be partially responsible for in the field of medieval drama, used, at the time, a very simple approach: it was all, ultimately, about comparing texts, about noting parallelisms, about finding common elements. His “Rabelais et le théâtre” became a real classic, often quoted as if it were the last word on the subject. That is all the more curious as in the same year 1911, and in the same journal, Emmanuel Philipot tried to complement Cohen’s article.12 Philologically, he did a good job, as he simply tried to add some clear textual influences to Cohen’s documentation, but at the same time, his contribution was conceptually rather poor as he simply tried to reduce all parallels to an influence of Rabelais on farces—and thereby also to date all farces with Rabelaisian influence after Rabelais. The simple idea that the great Rabelais might have been influenced by a ‘popular tradition’ (as scholarship had it, because in fact the tradition of farce-playing is far from just ‘popular’13) or that there may have been a common source, never entered his mind, and it could not have, naturally, given the perspectives and conditions of scholarship in these days. Philipot was working on textual parallels, and Rabelais was his reference. The whole idea of a common source was totally alien to his view: he was working on direct influences, and he most certainly was able to find lots of them, some more or less evident, but some also unexpected. Philipot’s article, however, has not been given the same attention in Rabelais scholarship as Cohen’s earlier text whereas historians and editors of French farces often refer to it. Cohen and Philipot were very serious scholars and their erudite findings are still authoritative, in a way. Everything they wrote still has some validity, even though when he wrote his article Cohen still ignored the farces he would publish in 1949,14 and also ignored the Recueil Trepperel, meaning that he did not consider about half of the known farce and sottie production—and, it has to be said, mainly the oldest part, the part certainly predating Rabelais’s novels, and

11 12 13

14

Gustave Cohen, “Rabelais et le théâtre,” Revue des études rabelaisiennes 9 (1911): 1–72. Emmanuel Philipot, “Notes sur quelques farces de la Renaissance,” Revue des études rabelaisiennes 9 (1911): 365–422. That is just another ‘paire de manches,’ but in fact, our first documentation about farce players stem from the context of French and Burgundian courts, as I will explain in my forthcoming Histoire de la farce. Cohen, Recueil de farces françaises inédites du xve siècle (Cambridge, MA: 1949).

rabelais and theatre

223

there is something highly ironic about that. Most certainly, Cohen’s “Rabelais et le théâtre” would have looked quite differently if he had published it in the 1950s, or if he had tried to seriously rewrite his text and adapt it to the latest findings.15 However, that is not where the problem lies. The real problem, for the literary historian, who also needs to be in a certain way a historian, has two connected sides to it. On the one hand, as we have seen above, one should be aware of the problematic status of theatre as such; on the other, one should also question the place of Rabelais’s work as an absolute masterpiece within the literary canon, and the generic designation of his work as novels (he called them chronicles). However, one must also remember that his work belonged to what is now called ‘minor’ traditions, but which were major at the time. A third major element in all this is the publication of Mikhail Bakhtin’s study on Rabelais.16 Not hindered by any specific knowledge of any specific textual material—as Bakhtin wrote all this in prison—the Russian scholar constructed a new concept of festive culture, of festivity as a place of non-contradiction, with an extended view on the carnivalesque, which would prove highly influential in Rabelais studies. In opposing popular culture and an elite culture, and especially in acknowledging the existence of a popular culture, which is in se dynamic and thus invigorating the old concept of folklore, Bakhtin opened new perspectives on Rabelais’s work and remained for some decades the ultimate and central reference. The theatre, hardly specifically named as such, has a major role to play in this conception. In fact, theatre came into discussion mainly through the reception of Bakhtin’s work, as many scholars immediately identified this ‘popular’ culture defined by Bakhtin as the world of French farce, and that came in handy, in a way, especially in a Marxist revalorization of ‘genres mineurs’ and popular literature. In this way, medieval theatrical texts became or remained part of what the Russian scholar called “popular culture” or even more specifically part of late medieval feast culture. Even though this novel concept of popular culture has been important and highly influential in Renaissance studies, we now know that French farces and sotties did not stem, at least not directly, from a ‘popular culture,’ but were on the contrary part of 15

16

In fact, Cohen did republish his article, or had it republished, in his 1956 Gallimard volume Études d’ histoire du théâtre au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, as if he himself did not realize how outdated the article was at that moment. See on this my “‘Recueil de farces’: Histoire d’ une notion et d’ une pratique du xixe siècle à Gustave Cohen,” in Les pères du théâtre medieval: Examen critique de la constitution d’un savoir académique, eds. M. Bouhaïk-Gironès, V. Dominguez, and J. Koopmans (Rennes: 2010), 157–177. Mikhaïl Bakhtine, L’ œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance, trans. A. Robel (Paris: 1970); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: 1968).

224

koopmans

an intellectual and academic culture in the early 16th century. Even worse, it is highly probable that French farce originated at the royal court; at least the first documents about farce-playing, about seventy years before Pathelin (ca. 1464), come from court records.17 The issue of the dates of these plays is here also eminently important. Ever since the 16th century, there has been a tendency to do away with farces and sotties as ‘medieval genres’; in fact, nearly all extant farces date from the 16th century—with Pathelin a notable exception, but Pathelin was known in Rabelais’s days as a classic of medieval poetry (in an octavo edition) and not as part of theatrical editions in the famous oblong ‘agenda’ format. It is certainly not a coincidence that Yan Greub, in his lexicographical studies on French ‘medieval’ farces discovered that Huguet’s dictionary of 16thcentury French language was of much more use than the classical dictionaries of Old French (such as Godefroy’s and Tobler-Lommatzsch’s). However, he simply failed to see the implication of this, namely that what we call medieval farce is mainly a 16th-century genre, and that the dating of texts must be seriously reconsidered.18 Bakhtin’s work has remained highly influential, though less in France than in the Anglo-American world of scholarship, but mainly for his intuition rather than for his specific analyses, simply because he has very little to offer in that respect. At the same time, the Bakhtinian approach had something extremely comforting to offer, as things simply remained in their place. The farce remained medieval and Rabelais remained Rabelais. Bakhtin reconnected categories, but he did not change their places. Within the context of what he could do in his days, he produced an important and highly influential study. That, in some way, documents were bent into the directions he was looking for appears quite logical, considering what he did, how he did it, and why he did it. His approach, however, has been invalidated by modern historiographical approaches. Scholarship since Bakhtin has been wrestling with the concept of popular culture and the nature of the possible documentation of this culture. Especially the claim of a culture ‘from, by, through’ the common people has been problematized in many studies. Nowadays, we tend to conceive this popular culture more as a widely diffused culture, not necessarily restricted to one class, and we also acknowledge the modes of transmission, the editorial strategies creating a culture for the common people. It is worth noting that, if one looks at the inven17

18

This point will be fully treated in my Histoire de la farce, forthcoming. It is however also noteworthy that all along the 15th and 16th centuries, farces were performed before kings, dukes, cardinals and that the iconographical evidence, mainly from the Low Countries, cannot hold any evidence about this specific practice. Yan Greub, Les mots régionaux dans les farces françaises (Strasbourg: 2003), 379.

rabelais and theatre

225

tories of humanists’ libraries, it is clear that they collected these popular texts, and in their condemnations of this type of literature, they show they are very well aware of its contents. The least one can say is that this ‘popular culture’ circulated in print, and thus amongst those who collected printed texts.19 All this means, of course, that a more systematic approach is urgently needed; Cohen and Philipot were looking for real textual parallels; Bakhtin, in a highly intuitive view, was trying to connect the Rabelaisian text to a festive culture but failed to document seriously. All that is highly excusable given the conditions in which he wrote his monograph on Rabelais. The three, however, have remained extremely influential in modern scholarship, and certainly not always for the best conceivable reasons. They were all chasing their white rabbits, but they lost track of what they were trying to do—their own program was compromised by the limits of their perspective. Other scholars have tried to find new ways to tackle the problem. Bruce Hayes, in Rabelais’s Radical Farce,20 has tried to show how Rabelais, in his use of medieval comical genres, went well beyond the ‘conservatism’ of these genres.21 My article on “Rabelais and the Spirit of Farce” tried to move beyond the textual parallels, as a farce is not only a farce as we know it (or as we think we know it, i.e., a typical medieval drama genre—which is in fact hardly medieval or typical); a farce is also simply a neat trick, a burla or beffa, as the Italians would call it, some kind of a practical joke performed on others, whereas my article on Rabelais’s prognostications tried to further illustrate such a contextualization in replacing Rabelais’s work within the hardly known context of the mock-prognostication in Western Europe. It is the same wish to resituate Rabelais within his own world and to retro-document literary culture in Rabelais’s days without too easily confining that literary culture to the literary canon as established in the 19th century that inspired my reflection on Rabelais and the ‘French Gothic’ of the first decades of the 16th century.22 Recently, 19

20 21

22

A case in point, here, may be the collection of Fernando Colombus, who bought many kinds of printed books all over Western Europe; it is now in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. He noted the date and place of purchase on his copies. E. Bruce Hayes, Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theatre and its function in Rabelais (Farnham: 2010). This has been criticized e.g., by Noah D. Guynn in a review of Hayes’s book in French Studies 66 (2012): 83–84. For our part, we see in this ‘conservatism’ mostly a modern construction, as from the point of theatrical savoir-faire and dramatic invention, French farces of the early 16th century can be seen as highly innovative, certainly experimental, and it comes as no surprise that some of the finest later dramatists considered the farce as an important model: not only Molière, Labiche, and Feydeau, but also Jarry, Max Jacob, Marcel Aymé, and Dario Fo. Koopmans, “La tradition des pronostications,” Éditer et publier Rabelais à travers les âges,

226

koopmans

Nicolas Le Cadet studied Rabelais and the culture of mystery plays, stressing particularly how and why Rabelais is part of the ‘parallel theology’ as defined in mystery plays.23 His major point is valid, but as mystery plays in the 15th and 16th centuries developed some kind of parallel theology, a rational understanding of sacred history, and as the theological implications of that have remained scarcely studied,24 it remains hardly possible to evaluate what Rabelais owed to this culture of religious drama and how and why his religious visions were determined by it. Therefore, we should consider this to be still an ‘open question.’ Bernd Renner and Barbara Bowen have tried to explore other avenues, in showing the visual qualities of Rabelais’s text, the mise-en-scène prevalent in his novels, and the necessary connection to the dramatic culture of his days.25 On the other hand, one of the major collections of farces that have come down to us, the famous Recueil du British Museum, consists mainly of plays printed in Lyons between 1530 and 1545, in the rue Mercière. Between 1538 and 1542, at the end of that street, Jean Neyron managed a permanent theatre where he staged above all morality plays,26 but as early as 1529, he was Abbot of the Maugouvert of the Saint-Vincent quarter; the rue Mercière had its own Maugouvert.27 Of course, Rabelais left Lyons in 1535, but he must have lived there in the proximity of a culture of theatrical performances, plays, and parody. That is not per se a popular culture, as we have seen above. It rather consists in a form of organization of parallel, ‘unofficial’ authorities that were not necessarily parodic—as they may have held some real, albeit festive, authority. This geographical proximity, however, is highly suggestive: one easily imagines Rabelais walking through the streets where all these dramatic texts were actu-

23

24 25

26 27

ed. P.J. Smith (Amsterdam: 1997), 35–65; Koopmans, “Rabelais et l’esprit de la farce,” Les grands jours de Rabelais en Poitou. Actes du colloque international de Poitiers, 30 août–1er septembre 2001, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget. (er) 43 (Geneva: 2006), 299–311; Koopmans, “L’inspiration livresque et l’ inspiration théâtrale: Le texte et le livre à l’époque de Rabelais,” in Rabelais et l’ hybridité des récits rabelaisiens, eds. D. Desrosiers-Bonin, C. La Charité, C. Veilleux, and T. Vigliano, (er) 56 (Geneva: 2017), 87–99. Nicolas Le Cadet, “Rabelais et les mystères,” in Inextinguible Rabelais. Actes du Colloque de Paris-Sorbonne (Novembre 2014) (Paris: 2021), 261–281. See also Le Cadets comprehensive study Rabelais et le théâtre (Paris: 2020). Jean-Pierre Bordier, Le jeu de la Passion: Le message chrétien et le théâtre français (xiiie– xvie s.) (Paris: 1998). Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007); Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing (NashvilleLondon: 1998), 53–56. Yvelise Dentzer, “Jean Neyron, créateur du premier théâtre permanent de Lyon,” Revue d’ histoire du théâtre 202 (1999): 101–112. Natalie Zemon Davis, Les cultures du peuple Rituels, savoirs, résistances (Paris: 1979), 203.

rabelais and theatre

227

ally printed and published, and given Rabelais’s probable implication in the printing industry, as illustrated by Mireille Huchon, one feels there must have been some concrete repercussions. With all that, we have some major elements providing a rapid overview to which many details could be added, but it gives us at least a fragmentary view on the topic of ‘Rabelais and theatre’. There should be, and there is one no doubt, a possibility to examine this topic through a more systematic and less anecdotal lens.

5

Approaches

There are several ways to approach the question. In fact, three issues need to be addressed: first, what Rabelais says about theatre—and that is already a highly tricky question; next, what Rabelais did with theatre—which is also not a very easy one because of the difficulty in defining influence, especially with regard to theatre in his day; and third, naturally, we want to know what theatre did with Rabelais. A preliminary question that needs to be addressed is the theatricality of the Rabelaisian text. Here, one thinks above all of the prologues, which are close to the genre of the dramatic monologue and even of the sermon joyeux. There is impersonation, there is a character addressing a public, there is a fiction of a charlatan or a bonimenteur trying to sell a product—and in these respects the Rabelaisian prologues are totally in line with the genre, which also overlapped in his day with the genre of the dramatic monologue: a character boasting of all he can do whereas in the (rudimentary) action of the monologue itself, it is totally clear he is unable to perform any of the glorious acts he boasts of. There are even indirect stage directions or implied actions woven into the text, such as in the opening lines of the Prologue of the Quart livre: Gens de bien, Dieu vous saulve et guard. Où estez vous? Je ne vous peuz veoir. Attendez que je chausse mes lunettes. Ha, ha. Bien et beau s’ en va Quaresme, je vous voy. Et doncques?28 oc, 523

One also thinks here of Zumthor’s affirmation that for all medieval literature, the distinction between the letter and the voice, between the text and its perfor28

cw 425: Good people, God save and guard you! [Where are you? I can’t see you.] Wait till I put my glasses on—my feet! Sweet and fair Lent goes its way! I do see you. And then what?

228

koopmans

mance, is in se an anachronism.29 Paul Smith has tried, in a number of highly interesting publications, to point to the question of the actio in rhetoric as a basis for this kind of verbal display and has thereby given some specificity to the question which, in Zumthor’s publications, remains rather general.30 The prologues are really prologues, they are meant to be seen as the action of a ‘docteur prolocuteur’. They are discourses or one-man shows, and as such full of indirect stage directions: the text, meant for reading, tells us what we should see. A second important element is Rabelais’s handling of the dialogue. There are many examples where Rabelais clearly exploits dialogical techniques we also find in dramatic dialogues and in sottie, for example staccato-style dialogues or exchanges of monosyllabic words. An eloquent example of this is to be found in chapter 38 of the Tiers livre, where Pantagruel and Panurge, in some sort of delirious expansion of the invitation addressed to all fools at the beginning of sotties, have a dialogue consisting of blazons and a vertiginous list of fools. The reference to the ‘cry’ at the opening of sotties is interesting, but what is much more interesting is the dialogic technique, entirely copied from the sottie genre: rapid sequences of fractured lines and a kind of delight in synonymy meant to “create euphoria through the word” (as Jean-Claude Aubailly called it). And it is certainly not a coincidence that in the subsequent dialogue, formalized as if it were a theatrical text, the octosyllables are everywhere.31 There is, as elsewhere in Rabelais, as all over the French sotties, a dysfunction of communication: language is diverted from its primordial function, words are simply running off. And yet there is something highly problematic in that. As most scholars did not really understand the sottie texts, they claimed that they were not meant to be understood, that they were just pure nonsense, which is, from the point of view of method, an elegant way of cleaning your own stoop. The same problem goes for many chapters in Rabelais’s works: where scholars failed to give meaning, they gladly invoked the nonsensical nature of this type of texts (and that settled

29 30

31

Paul Zumthor, La lettre et la voix: De la ‘littérature’ médiévale (Paris: 1987). Paul Smith, “Rabelais and the Art of Memory,” in Rabelais in Context. Proceedings of the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference, ed. B.C. Bowen (Birmingham, AL: 1993), 41–54; “Voix et geste chez Rabelais,” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 33 (1992): 133–144. The octosyllable, being the standard form used in farces and sotties is omnipresent in Rabelais’s works. A systematic enquiry into this would be highly revealing, I guess, as my first superficial review showed astonishing results, that the Rabelaisian prosody has been highly influenced by the rhythm of farce and sottie dialogues in particular, and probably also by what happened on the mystery play stage—which may very well have been much less different from farce than modern scholarship wants us to believe.

rabelais and theatre

229

it), and even worse: they celebrated that unlimited nonsense as a philosophical and/or poetical basis for the text. And there is something convincing to it, but also something highly unsatisfactory, and from a point of view of methodology, one must say, highly curious. The funniest aspect is that Rabelais himself, on many occasions, problematizes reading and interpreting his text, and invites the reader to reflect on the problem of the textual and the visual, and when he does not do so overtly, he has his text do it for him.

6

References to Drama

Our first central question is to find out whether there are specific references to performances in Rabelais’s work.32 The Farce de maître Pathelin is everywhere, though it is hard to determine whether Rabelais knew this farce as a performance or as a classical printed text. Panurge’s multilingual intervention in P ix has often been seen as a literary ‘reprise’ of a theatrical text, of the famous scene in which Pathelin pretends to be seriously ill and agonizing while speaking all sorts of different languages. At the same time, let us not forget that, even in its printed form, the Panurge moment in Rabelais is a real numéro d’acteur, a show; it is something to be done, to be performed, and the mere fact that Rabelais wants to have this performance ‘on paper’ (but is that really true?) does not seriously alter anything in that respect. This first inquiry is about quoting theatrical texts. It is of some use here to make a clear distinction between the instances where Rabelais refers to theatre or theatrical practices, and, second inquiry, the cases where—as far as we can know—he refers to a reality of theatre or play (or staging). A third category would comprise quotes from drama texts and names of famous characters in plays. First of all, we can see how deeply the theatrical really informs the basis of the text in considering the overt references to theatrical terms such farce, mystery, comedy, tragedy, play … In many of these cases, however, theatrical terminology has or may have been used in a metaphorical sense, meaning that it is rather tricky to determine. The intervention of the famous “écolier limousin” in P vi has not been interpreted in a theatrical context, but it is clearly a reworking of the character of the “écumeur de latin,” the Latin-skimmer (but also: the one who gets rid of all the –cum endings of Latin words). This skimmer was a character in sotties, and probably a stock character in Triboulet’s troupe:

32

A full inventory can be found in Le Cadet, Rabelais et le théâtre, 77–229.

230

koopmans

Cavons de ramonner dispars Et immictés bien mes vestiges Et nous involviron noz liges Pour les dissiper subit.33 It is highly probable that this specific character in the sottie is a portrayal of Andrieu de La Vigne, who overdid the ‘Gallicizing’ of Latinity in his Complaintes et épitaphes du roi de la Basoche (1501),34 but the target was more general.35 Guillaume Coquillart and Roger de Collerye refer to Latin-skimming.36 The Instructif de seconde rhétorique as well as Pierre Fabri, in his Grant et vrai art de pleine rhétorique (1521), already included the example of the ‘Latin-skimmers’ who say “Se vous ludez à la pille, vous amitterez”; Geoffroy Tory also denounced them.37 This is a direct link, as Tory states: Quand Escumeurs de Latin disent Despumons la verbocination latiale, & transfertons la Sequane au dilucule … And there, we recognize Rabelais—or Tory through Rabelais (P vi, 232–233). Interpreting such borrowings raises a typical problem in Rabelais studies, and in the study of canonical texts in general. Yet in the same context, in P xix, there is the famous debate “par signes.” Of course, this is a chapter about the power of words in relation to reality, but it is at the same time a serious reflection on a current practice, as many performances were given “par signes” and these mute performances were sometimes, after a break, done again with words. Somewhere between the tableau vivant and the ‘full’ performance, there is this mimed performance, indicated in contemporary sources as “par signes.” This is not a Rabelaisian invention; it is a reference to current practice. One could argue that, here, maître François is clearly defending the superiority of performance over text—in a text which extends his trademark paradoxical approach to the topic of these pages. Many other references to theatre are simply situated on the level of intertextuality. Something general about intertextuality should be said here, as it 33 34 35 36 37

Eugénie Droz, Le recueil Trepperel: Les sotties (Paris: 1935), 174. Cf. Jean-Pierre Chambon, “Andrieu de La Vigne, source de Rabelais?,” er 29 (1993): 57–61. Eric McPhail, “The Elegance of the Écolier Limousin: The European Context of Rabelais’s Linguistic Parody,” Modern Language Notes 123 (2008): 873–894. Mike Freeman, Les Œuvres de Guillaume Coquillart (Geneva: 1975), 137; Sylvie Lécuyer, Roger de Collerye, un héritier de Villon (Paris: 1997). Olivier Halévy, “Des règles poétiques à la norme linguistique,” crmh 21 (2011): 265–282, 266–267.

rabelais and theatre

231

also is about who ‘owns’ what. There is the author and the tradition, the latter being a result of the former’s text, which made things into what they became. However, it is clear that this way of presenting things is problematic in terms of methodology. Furthermore, we all know that in the case of parallels, there are three possibilities: influence of A on B, influence of B on A, or a common source. The third possibility, involving a common source, is especially tricky in the case of our theme, “Rabelais and theatre.” Most often, we do not know, we cannot know. That the character Grandgousier already gave his name to a farce around 1515 is an important finding, but it does not, in the long run, solve anything, as this farce may very well be the only one extant of a series of different farces with this very same character, of which many may have been closer to the novels than the text we accidentally have. If we further pursue our inventory of references to theatre in the Pantagruelic cycle, one of the natural things to do is to turn to the famous catalogue of the Library of Saint-Victor, that brilliant first instance of a ‘bibliothèque imaginaire’ (P vii). All could be there, if the work of annotation had been systematic. In this famous Library of Saint-Victor, we find lots of allusions to drama culture: for example, the famous Franc-Archer de Bagnolet, referring to the monologue of the Franc-Archer de Bagnolet; Thevot le Maire (cum figura Thevotis), referring clearly to a cycle of texts on Thevot;38 the Invention de sainte Croix jouée par les clercs de finesse—where the joke is that the invention of the Holy Cross is certainly a worthy theme for a mystery play. At the same time, a ‘croix’ is also a French coin, and thus the ‘invention’ of it means ‘how to find money,’ and the clerks are of course part of a religious organization, but the specification ‘de finesse’ tends to show they are, in fact, some sort of pickpockets. This type of ambiguity is what we find in most references to drama, and most often it remains unclear whether this has to do with our faulty and insufficient documentation, or whether it is simply an intentional play or pun. Let us give another important example. The Tiers livre can be seen in its totality as a brilliant reworking of a ‘chante-farce’ dating from around 1515, the Farce de Regnault qui se marie à la Volée.39 In fact, the farce is a brilliant reworking of a popular chanson, or it is at least a creation deriving from a popular chanson which generates a dramatic action. And, of course, à la volée is also a proverbial expression meaning: ‘light-heartedly, without really thinking,’ but here it becomes the name of the future spouse of poor Regnault. The farce in the Florence collection has some typological interest to it: I have called this one

38 39

Koopmans, Recueil de Florence, 106–108. Koopmans, Recueil de Florence, 125–136.

232

koopmans

a ‘chante-farce’ as the whole farce relies on the song—no farce possible without the song—and this case is very special. In many other farces, song culture is present; in many other farces the actors sing (together at the end, in groups during the performance). And in fact, the chanson is a very popular one, known in many settings for several parts—with Lourdaud instead of Regnault. And next to this specific song reference, the Tiers livre is entirely constructed on dialogue, and the dialogues are reminiscent of drama practice. In a way, the Tiers livre is a rendering not of a specific performance but of performance practice in general, and its text is entirely designed to do just that. Yet the Quart livre is totally different, but the Quart livre is also highly important from a theatrical point of view.

7

Passion de Saint-Maixent

In his Quart livre, Rabelais relates the organization of a passion play at SaintMaixent, in the Poitou region (xiii–xv). This may very well have been triggered by actual Passion performances we know took place at these dates in the region. More interesting, however, is what this whole episode is about. What was at stake, in fact, was whether the Church could lend church appurtenances to the staging of religious plays, and that really was a hot item in these days and can be related to a large number of documents and incidents to which I will return. Rabelais imagined all this in a context where the old François Villon, who had disappeared from history in 1463, retired to Saint-Maixent. I cannot help thinking that Rabelais wished to pay homage to the humanist François Billon (Villon himself stated that he was the one who well knew how to rhyme on billon); there is no clear wish here to create yet another François Villon legend, but he did, and this retirement of Villon has found its way into novels and other curious literary artifacts. “Leur vouloir fut, et non le mien”—Villon, the first maître François in French literature, would have said. This passage in the Quart livre is dense and rich. If we look at the actual organization of Passion plays in the Poitou region, it seems clear that Rabelais had a model for this, probably the Poitiers Passion of 1532, but other possibilities can be explored. Next to that, some other points need to be mentioned. First, the litigious point in the passage is concerned with the use of church appurtenances in theatre productions. This problem was still actual at the 1664 première of Molière’s Tartuffe, as the main criticism there was not against the depiction of the hypocritical Tartuffe, but more against the fact that Molière presented him in a real abbé costume. What Rabelais could not have known was that in 1566 there was a trial in Brussels, because actors had used real

rabelais and theatre

233

Franciscan frocks.40 And I guess, that, if we systematically investigated this specific question in our archival records, we might come up with an interesting frame in which we could interpret our Quart livre-passage. The fact that, according to Villon, in chapter xiii, this only goes for secular performances is highly interesting—this problem is not, as such, documented in other sources. The reference to theatre as practiced in Brussels, showing on the one hand some knowledge of theatrical practice in the French- (and Dutch?-) speaking world, may be a clear reference to the Bliscappen, the Seven Joys of Our Lady, a cycle of seven plays performed in Brussels between 1441/1448 and 1566, or to the cycle of the Seven Sorrows, also regularly staged in a seven-year cycle in Brussels,41 but, on the other hand, as Villon seems to be referring above all to secular plays, Rabelais may have had something else in mind. The question would be, of course, what he could be specifically referring to—and there, historiography of theatre practice in Brussels in the early 16th century fails us—as ever since Frédéric Faber’s history of Belgian theatre,42 no seriously documented history has been written and no archival research has been undertaken. But Rabelais knew something we do not know any longer, that much is clear. The complex circulation of knowledge about performances, about local specialties—such as the “cinges verts de Chauny,” probably the Passion plays staged in the Poitou, or contemporaneous theatre practices in Lyons, is extremely difficult to document in a rigorous way. The circulation of information, bridging local cultures and broader knowledge, remains problematic. We know of travelers who knew exactly where to go to see a specific performance, even outside France, yet we know that certain types of performances were really restricted to a local cultural infrastructure. One sometimes has the feeling that Rabelais manages to combine both. One thing we can say about this Passion episode is that Rabelais was perfectly aware of the central problems, and most certainly knowledgeable about the central issues of theatre in his time—and maybe also in the long duration, but did he know that?

40 41

42

Anne-Laure De Bruaene, Om Beters Wille: Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650) (Amsterdam: 2008), 115–118. Remco Sleiderink, “The Brussels Plays of the Seven Sorrows,” in The Seven Sorrows Confraternity of Brussels: Drama, Ceremony, and Art Patronage (16th–17th Centuries), ed. E.S. Thelen (Turnhout: 2015), 51–66. Frédéric Faber, Histoire du théâtre français en Belgique (Brussels: 1888), 5 vols.

234 8

koopmans

A Shared Festive Culture

Naturally, it is not easy to assess the precise meaning of many theatrical references in Rabelais. Are they about theatre, or are theatre and Rabelais drawing on common sources? And which may these common sources have been (popular culture is an easy explanation, but also a passably vague one)? To give just one example of a possible common source: if Rabelais states that Couillatris “s’en sceint sus le cul, comme Martin de Cambray” (ql prologue, 532; cw 433: “… girds it over his tail like Martin of Cambria”), he may very well refer to the Farce de Martin de Cambray,43 but the two may exploit another (not otherwise documented) expression. The famous bataille des Andouilles in the ql xxxv–xlii is a case in point. Of course, the ‘captains’ Tailleboudin and Rifflandouille recall through their sole names the opposition between Lent and Carnival, and they represent the ‘cuisine grasse’. Furthermore, their names are very adequate in the context of this particular battle. Tailleboudin and Rifflandouille, however, had had a long history on the stage, where they had functioned as a kind of standard set of ‘tyrants’ who martyrized Christian saints—for example, in the mystery of saint Sébastien (1448–1480, Lyons). Much could be said about how and why the world of pagans and Romans in French mystery plays is represented as the world of the carnivalesque, of fat kitchen, as a vertigo of food and abundance— and this reinsertion of what has too easily been called “popular culture” within a general view on civilization and the Christian world, is in itself remarkable. That particular background for the bataille is important, but there is another element. In 1529, according to Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès’s solid dating, the humanist François Habert published in Paris his carnival play La tresdure bataille et paix du glorieulx saint Pensard à l’encontre de Caresme. Let us consider this play to be what it is: a mid-16th century play by a humanist and not some kind of folklore remainder of the Middle Ages. It must have been, given its sources in the culture of the basoche of Issoudun, a reflection of the world of Habert, but also of Billon, known to Rabelais. This is not just about popular culture or traces of things medieval, it is also about some kind of actuality, about what humanists were doing. And it is exactly because of that, because of this layered reality of simple names and broader themes, that assessing drama in Rabelais is problematic, and difficult to reduce to something specific. And let us not forget, also, that Tailleboudin has an important role in Noël du Fail’s Propos rustiques, and that one of the farces in the Recueil de Florence makes passing

43

Koopmans, Recueil de Florence, 563–580.

rabelais and theatre

235

mention of Tailleboudin.44 Thus, the mise-en-scène in the Quart livre cannot be reduced to a unique and simple theatrical reference, but on the other hand, it is clear that the theatrical world is present more or less everywhere in this episode. In fact, the question of who is referring to what and where the possible origins may be is irrelevant: the most important for us, here and now, is simply to acknowledge the possibility of such complex cultural communications and to try to analyze our documents in full awareness of these types of realities. At the same time, it is important to consider the logic behind the documents we have: there is a good reason why some texts have come down to us, there are good reasons why certain dramatic performances have left traces in records, there are good reasons why we have normative sources about drama—and, let us not forget, there are also good reasons for parts of this to be only manuscript, and good reasons for parts of this to have been printed. All that seems fine, and the reader may wonder why this is recalled here. The point is that, aside from the logic and the circumstances of what we know, and what we can know, unfortunately, there is also a much more complicated and much more speculative question of what we do not know. In other words: how far is it possible to make the silences speak? There are good reasons for our knowledge, but there are also solid reasons for our ignorance. Unsatisfactory as it may seem, one must accept that many theatrical performances in general and most accounts of a specific staging have simply left no traces. This implies that there is a difficult documentary filter at work, and we do not really understand how it works. Therefore, we can hardly evaluate the value and the representative nature of what we have. Most certainly, many good plays never made it into print (they were too good for that, or too polemical, or too circumstantial, or printers simply thought a certain text would not work in print). Of course, these considerations are more or less part of any good history class at university, but in the world of literature, scholars seem to be free to do other things, and not to ask the essential questions. This also means that we do not only have a certain responsibility to interpret what our knowledge means, but also to assess clearly what our ignorance may represent and what the possible logic behind all that we do not know may be.

44

Noël du Fail, Propos rustiques, eds. G.-A. Pérouse and R. Dubuis (Geneva: 1994), chapter 8; Koopmans, Recueil de Florence, nº xxvii.

236 9

koopmans

Farce as a Metaphor

In his prologue to the Quart livre, Rabelais explains the medical profession as a farce for three characters: the patient, the illness, and the doctor. This has often been quoted in various contexts, but most scholars have failed to see why the reference is highly problematic. In itself, of course, it stands. It may however be interpreted “à plus hault sens.” As throughout the 16th century we have problematic representations, in allegorical plays or moralities, of an ill world, of a sick Christianity, with the Bible text as remedy, it cannot be excluded that Rabelais, here, is referring explicitly to these representations. In other words: the Hippocratic joke is sufficient (and has been sufficient) and it remains impossible to prove there is more to it, but there may very well have been more to it. We could be inclined to believe he is referring to the La maladie de Chrestienté, or Le Malade, or the Theologastres, or the Lyons sottie with a Doctor as a character,45 but ultimately, we may never know. Where method strands … But speech was controlled, and one of the interesting parts of Rabelais’s work is the trajectory from his Pantagruel, when all still seemed to be possible, with its outburst of unbridled creativity, to the later books, where there is clearly a problem of self-censorship. This means that, here, the theatrical reference seems strong, highly plausible, but, due to the elusive nature of the text, it remains speculative nonetheless. And one cannot fail to mention the sacrosanct tradition according to which Rabelais, as he lay dying, presumably said: “curtain, the farce is over.” This anecdote is clearly apocryphal: theatre in Rabelais’s days simply did not have a front curtain as we know it in modern theatre, but simply a back curtain, to suggest a third space, to host the souffleur, extra costumes, and accessories, but there was no curtain to be ‘closed’ at the end of the performance. This is more about Rabelaisian legend than it is about Rabelais himself. There is one instance where we have the actual text of a farce presented as a facetious story in Rabelais, and that is the “sœur Fessue” episode in the tl xix. Aside from all dating problems (is Rabelais adapting the farce? is the farce posterior to Rabelais? is the farce prior to Rabelais but in its actual state a ‘return’ of Rabelais’s Tiers livre?), we have, here, the Tiers livre story, and a corresponding

45

“La maladie de Chrestienté de Mathieu Malingre,” in Recueil général des moralités françaises, eds. J. Beck, E. Doudet, t.13 (Paris: forthcoming); Nancy Erickson-Bouzrara and Catherine Masson (eds.), Théâtre de femmes de l’ Ancien Régime, t. i (Paris: 2007); Claude Longeon (ed.), La farce des théologastres (Geneva: 1989); Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Jelle Koopmans, and Katell Lavéant (eds.), Recueil des sotties françaises, t. i (Paris: 2014), 439– 450.

rabelais and theatre

237

farce from the famous La Vallière manuscript, which documents the repertory of a local troupe around 1570.46 Of course it is impossible, in any way, to assess what exactly in Rabelais relates to religious performances, and how and why Rabelais incorporated the parallel theology of the mystery plays, even though Le Cadet tried to assess this point—and did a good job.

10

Rabelais ‘en reprise’ or Staging Rabelais

Finally, there is the dramatization of Rabelais. Over the centuries, Rabelais’s work has led to all kinds of adaptations and it has been highly influential in theatre culture.47 There is something highly paradoxical about it, as we have, on the one hand, the clear oral tone and the implicated performance in Rabelais’s text, but on the other hand its worldliness, its refusal, in a way, to become a performance text, as shown in the multiple unpronounceable words, the catalogues devoid of any action, accounts, chansons, poems, in short: everything that is not easily to be reduced to a standard octosyllabic performance. And yet the Rabelaisian style has been adopted in many works (pamphlets and narratives), and it has also had a prolific afterlife on stage. There is something special about Rabelais, about his texts, which are extremely performative, as we have seen above, and at the same time defy the practice of performance. However, dramatists have found an important inspiration in Rabelais. The first stage adaptations come from the court ballet culture of the early 17th century.48 In 1626, a ballet, La naissance de Pantagruel, was performed at Carnival festivities in the Castle of Blois; in 1638 there was a “Bouffonnerie rabeleisque” which shows, nearly in their order of appearance in the novel, the characters of the Tiers livre; in the same year there was a Ballet de Pantagruélistes and around 1645 two ballets staging the oracle of the Sybil of Panzoust. Adaptations in—mainly—farce and comedy are numerous. Montaubon wrote his comedies Pantagruel and Les aventures de Panurge around 1654; in 1720, Jacques Autreau produced, at the Théâtre des Italiens, Panurge à marier 46 47

48

Edition of the farce: André Tissier (ed.), Recueil de farces (1450–1550), t. xi (Geneva: 1997), 237–289, with an introduction, 237–247 giving a good review on earlier scholarship. A repertory has been published by Catherine E. Campbell, A History of Ballet, Opera, Theater, and Stories Inspired by François Rabelais: The Fountain of French Music, Art, and Literature (Lewiston, NY: 2008); see also Le Cadet, Rabelais et le théâtre, 403–408. Henri Clouzot, “Ballets tirés de Rabelais au xviie siècle,” Revue d’études rabelaisiennes 5 (1907): 90–97; Françoise Lavocat, “Danser le roman: Allégorie et fiction dans le ballet du xviie siècle,” in Sur quel pied danser: Danse et littérature, ed. E. Nye (Amsterdam-New York: 2005), 73–89, 80–84.

238

koopmans

and Panurge marié dans les espaces imaginaires. In the year 7 (1799) the citoyens Dieu-la-Foy and Prévôt-d’Iray created their Quart d’heure de Rabelais; Théophile Marion wrote in 1813 his Gargantua ou Rabelais en voyage under the pseudonym M. du Mersan. In 1835 Adolphe de Leuven wrote his Rabelais ou le presbytère de Meudon. For the 20th century, mention should be made of Albert du Bois’s Rabelais, which premiered at the Bouffes parisiennes in 1904. In Italy, Tonino Conte produced a memorable Gargantua in 1966 in Parma, Jean-Louis Barraultand and Marc Lenormant adapted La guerre picrocholine to the stage for the Théâtre de l’Hôtel de ville in 1972. In Brussels, Émile Lanc created in 1993 a rhapsodic Rabelaisian show under the title Le rire de Rabelais. In 2003 the Romanian director Silviu Purcărete staged in Cluj Napoca (Romania) the adaptation His Sister Pantagruel, as part of a longer reflection on how to use canonical texts for ideological criticism and historical distance; there was a reprise in Ljubljana in 2012. And most certainly, our 21st century has not lost the interest in Rabelais on stage: in 2009, the company Queue ni Tête produced a Pantagruel, with Pantagruel himself played by an actor and the other characters by puppets; in 2010, the company Aïe aïe aïe toured with a highly acclaimed Gargantua staged by Jullien Bellamo; at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in 2012, Jean Bellorini had a successful performance of his Paroles gelées; also in 2012, Didier Galas created for the Théâtre National de Bretagne in Rennes a play called Parlapole “after François Rabelais.” Even more recently, Konstantin Bogolomov did a Gargantua and Pantagruel in 2015, which proved a great success is Moscow; in 2013, Benjamin Lazar’s and Olivier Martin Salvan’s Pantagruel “gave all the savor to the text,” according to the critics, and in 2016 Emmanuel Du Pasquier did, in Switzerland, a Pantagruel and Panurge. These few examples chosen amongst the most canonical, and the more recent, show clearly that over the centuries, stage directors have continuously been fascinated by the dramatic possibilities of Rabelais’s texts, but maybe also, and maybe more so, by the exceptional qualities of his dialogues. Not all playwrights are good at dialogues, and few novelists are—as most practitioners of theatre know—but the ones who are good at it, are really good, and Rabelais is certainly one of them. One of the more spectacular examples of what theatre did with Rabelais is to be found on the opera stage. In itself, there is nothing to astonish us here, as the noble art of opera consists in an all-embracing concept of all arts and disciplines—a concept that Rabelais would have liked if he had known about it. The operatic art, from the start, was highly inspired by medieval and early Renaissance subjects—but this has been eclipsed in traditional opera historiography. Just to give some examples: as early as the 18th century, PierreAlexandre Monsigny, with his Isle sonnante (1767), and André Grétry, with his

rabelais and theatre

239

Panurge dans l’île des Lanternes (1785) on a libretto by Chefdeville, set the tone. Three major productions to be noted in the 19th century are Theódore Labarre’s Pantagruel (1855), Hervé’s Panurge in 1879 (and let us not forget that Hervé was, after Jacques Offenbach, of course, the master of the concept of the folies dramatiques), and Robert Panquette’s Panurge (1895). Labarre’s work is especially interesting, as the censors—who had not seen any harm in the libretto—suddenly discovered allusions to contemporary politics. Things seriously changed in the 20th century, as especially the experimental side of Rabelais’s works became an integral part of operatic writing. This is already clear in Claude Terrasse’s opéra bouffe in five acts, based on a libretto by Alfred Jarry (1911). Jules Massenet, a systematically underestimated composer, but really one of the greatest French composers of dramma per musica, wrote Panurge, “haulte farce musicale,” which premiered in 1913—with a splendid role for the bass-baritone Vanny Marcoux.49 That, for Massenet, a farce could be ‘high’ and ‘musical’ already shows the extreme intelligence of this composer, who saw well before Dario Fo that the art of farce is a noble art. His Panurge set a standard. In 1935, Antoine Mariotte will produce a Gargantua. A rather radical change can be observed when, in 1984, Azio Corghi mounted an astonishing premiere of his opera Pantagruel, with a spectacular stage design, with experimental sound effects, electronics and music combining the style of the historical avant-garde (Stravinsky and Bartók) with the Renaissance madrigal style, and popular music from Italy. Azio Corghi’s work on Rabelais can be seen as one of the most radical and intelligent opera renderings. In yet another stage art, Rabelais has its importance. In the puppet theatre repertoire, there are some examples to be found: La Fanfarria, in Colombia, performed El Gran Comilon Don Pantagruel in 1981. Flash Marionettes did a Les Pantagruéliques in 2002 for four puppeteers and two technicians, with more than 50 puppets, amongst which a 4-meter Gargantua; the Théâtre Sur le fil produced a Garganthéâtre in 1975: four puppeteers, one musician, and a technician. The Compagnie Anonimo Teatro even proposes a “barbecue philologique,” a show with puppets and objects, under the title Comment Pantagruel rompit les andouilles aux genoulx. This last section of this chapter may look like an eclectic list, but at the same time, it is there to show that the dramatic artist that Rabelais probably was— even if documentation fails—has also in a certain way been illustrated by his afterlife. In all that, it is particularly noteworthy that especially the operatic stage and the puppeteers fully recognized why Rabelais is so theatrical, and it

49

Avant-Scène Opéra 161 (1994).

240

koopmans

may be seen as a significant fact that, in a way, it is not ‘regular drama’, but the ‘other drama’ that fully realized the scenic possibilities of Rabelais’s novels.

11

Tentative Conclusion

A typology of all the ways in which Rabelais relates to theatrical practice is difficult to establish. The sheer notion of ‘theatre’ was highly problematic in Rabelais’s days. Yet he lived theatre, and theatre is omnipresent in his texts. Earlier publications on the subject of Rabelais and theatre have looked for possibilities of approaching this topic, and they have done so from different perspectives. In explaining these perspectives, we have been led to other views, we have explored other fields and new openings. Especially the afterlife of Rabelais on stage, the last section of this chapter, has an important place as it shows something of the potential of the text, and thereby also constitutes a witness of the gigantic potential of Rabelais’s text. These adaptations do not simply build upon Rabelais, they merely realize what is there. At the same time, some new and unexpected relations between Rabelais and theatre practice have been uncovered, but it still is our feeling that this cannot be anything else but an introduction, and that the real mise au point on this subject still remains to be written.50 50

Nicolas Le Cadet, Rabelais et le théâtre (Paris: 2021) was published too late to be taken into systematic consideration for this chapter.

part 2 The Five Books

∵

chapter 10

Pantagruel Jean-Charles Monferran and Marie-Claire Thomine

Pantagruel marks the entry into the realm of fiction, under the comic guise of Alcofrybas Nasier, of the learned François Rabelais. An epoch-making work if ever there was one, an “œuvre de rupture,”1 yet one which, at first glance, seems to be part of a well-established novelistic tradition.

1

About the Title

To judge by the title page of its first edition (Lyon: 1532), published by Claude Nourry, the book seems in many ways satisfied to seek out echoes of romans de chevalerie and their accounts of heroes’ valiant deeds: Pantagruel. The Frightful and Shocking Deeds and Exploits of the Very Famous Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua. Recently Composed by Master Alcofrybas Nasier [Pantagruel. Les horribles et espoventables faictz et prouesses du tresrenommé Pantagruel Roy des Dipsodes, filz du grand geant Gargantua, composez nouvellement par maistre Alcofrybas Nasier].2 This long title is worth considering for the insights it gives into the way in which Rabelais plays with traditions and blurs boundaries.3 For a start, rather than inventing the name of his hero, Rabelais borrowed a name associated not with the novel but with medieval theater and its mys-

1 Michel Simonin, Vivre de sa plume au xvie siècle ou la carrière de François de Belleforest (Geneva: 1992), 9. 2 For Pantagruel the translation of the title is the present translator’s; Donald Frame uses a title found in later editions: “Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes, Restored to his Natural State with his Frightful Deeds and Exploits. Composed by the Late Master Alcofribas, Abstractor of Quintessence” (p. 131). [Translator’s addition.] 3 Huchon reproduces Juste’s 1542 edition (the last to be printed during Rabelais’s lifetime) along with an apparatus of variants allowing variants in the first edition to be readily cited. Between the first, 1532 edition and that of 1542, and in intervening editions, Rabelais varied the division into chapters, added to his lists, almost systematically exaggerated effects, while suppressing some comic references to Scripture, and more rarely, attenuating some obscenities. On the intermediary edition of 1534, issued by François Juste, which contained a long final addition (repeated in following editions), see below.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_012

244

monferran and thomine

tery plays. There Pantagruel was known as a little devil, who took malicious pleasure in sprinkling salt into the mouths of his sleeping victims. Rabelais’s character retains this thirst-provoking quality. It explains his birth in droughtstricken Africa, the reason for his strange name (“all-thirsty”), explained in a playful Greco-Arab etymology found in the second chapter. His natural predisposition under the circumstances, was to become king of the Dipsodes (Greek for “Thirsty people”). This explains the motivation of some of the details of his adventures. Still, the range of these actions is changed. The character who, in his metamorphoses from malicious little devil serving Proserpine, became the complete opposite, a well-intentioned giant and a king, generally aims at something other than a nasty practical joke. If the characters of Rabelais’s novel are thirsty—and this motif is a structural element of the tale—they seek wine (source of joy and laughter), acquaintances, as well as, perhaps, truth and God’s message. Furthermore, in making him his own, Rabelais confers upon his character an illustrious ancestry, declaring him to be the son of … Gargantua, creating a new snare for the reader in 1532. The start of that very year saw the appearance of the anonymous Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Huge Giant Gargantua [Grandes et inestimables chroniques de l’ énorme géant Gargantua], a considerable commercial success. From the first lines of the prologue, Alcofrybas presents himself as an unconditional admirer. Rabelais’s novel, profiting from the recent fame of the Grandes Chroniques, is presented as its continuation. Parodying Arthurian romances, these Chroniques recount the exploits of a young giant, son of Grant-Gosier and Gallemelle, both created by Merlin the magician. Having come to France from the Orient, Gargantua enters Arthur’s service and vanquishes the king’s worst enemies, excelling at fighting horrifying giants. In addition to the hero, Rabelais borrows several episodes from this tale, as well as notable characteristics of the first two novels, although he gives them an unanticipated depth. The notion of Pantagruel as a continuation is in large part a ploy. Moreover, the gigantic stature of the heroes, essential to the Chroniques, is intermittent in Pantagruel. It becomes particularly salient when recounting the hero’s childhood, or during wars, and is hardly noticeable in other chapters. Rabelais created a link between Pantagruel, a background character in medieval mystery plays, and Gargantua, a giant, hero of a successful popular tale, whom he also decides to turn into the King of Utopia or King of the Amaurotes (“invisible people”), echoing Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia. The present and tradition live side by side, as do humanist texts and those intended for a broader audience. The hybrid nature of Rabelais’s first novel is also apparent in the material presentation of the work. The name of the two heroes appears in a

pantagruel

245

prominent place; the unassuming look of the book, a quarto, and its Gothic typeface make Pantagruel look like a popular pamphlet. Doubts arise only at the woodcuts surrounding the title page, borrowed from Claude Nourry, a publisher who specialized in printing law books. An informed buyer might see here the indication of a learned work in which satire of the world of the law plays a considerable role. Like Rabelais the author, the title page presents a mixture of codes. What it seems at first to present as a roman de chevalerie—certainly with an exaggeration that renders it suspect from the start—turns out to be a continuous parody of that genre. Pantagruel borrows its general structure from a genre that was still extremely popular in 1530: the noble hero’s childhood, followed by his apprenticeship, then his first armed encounter. But, as the prologue maliciously reminds us, it cannot really be compared to Robert the Devil, Fierabras, William the Fearless, Huon de Bourdeaux, Monteville and Matabrune [Robert le Diable, Fierabras, Guillaume sans paour, Huon de Bourdeaulx, Monteville et Matabrune], “topnotch books” (cw 134) [“livres de haute fustaye” (oc 214)]. He cannot resist the temptation to turn them upside down into a grotesque version of the original. More generally, the heroic style connecting ancient epics, chansons de geste, and the roman de chevalerie is continually evoked, its motifs continually turned inside out. In fact, it is hard to find a single page of Pantagruel without a transposed reference to the Iliad, the Odyssey, or the Aeneid, without a comic reworking of scenes associated with tales of valor. So, we find that Pantagruel sometimes recalls Hercules (but with “more sense in [his] ass,” [cw 226]) [“plus de sens au cul” (oc 316)], as Panurge says, or is like Aeneas, or even like Roland fighting the Saracens. These connections at first create a sense of pleasure in readers at recognizing familiar stories jestingly turned to another end. They can also alert them to focus on the crucial question for Rabelais the humanist, of the truth-value of a historical account. In plunging into a kind of fiction that openly uses history in the most far-fetched fashion, Rabelais, donning the mantle of Lucian to distinguish fictional or legendary stories from history at the same time as he condemns in passing tales which shamelessly assimilate the two, presents fiction as historical truth. If Pantagruel is a parody of prose tales of chivalry, it is even more that of the genre of (pseudo-) chronicles which he enjoys showing up, tales such as the “Turpin stories” along with “Mother Goose stories” (cw 226) [“fables de Turpin” (sic) […] “les contes de la Cigogne” (oc 317)] which Panurge tells the giants during the duel between Pantagruel and Loup Garou, echoing the recent The Chronicle and history done and composed by the Reverend Father Turpin, Archbishop of Reims […] containing the acts of valor and arms occurring in his time by the most magnanimous King Charles the Great, otherwise known as Charlemagne and his nephew Roland, printed in Paris

246

monferran and thomine

in the summer of 1527.4 Moreover, Pantagruel, seen as a mock-chronicle, also owes something to the farce or to purely popular literature sold by street hawkers. To see this more clearly, let us turn now to the author, “Master Alcofrybas Nasier,” the last character mentioned on the title page. Unlike Gargantua and Pantagruel, Alcofrybas Nasier, an anagram of François Rabelais, was unknown, and except perhaps in the circle of those close to him, not readily identifiable. In any case, this name immediately provokes a smile. He who, starting in 1534, was to become the “abstractor of Quintessence” (cw 131), situating his mastery midway between sublime knowledge and fantasy, also evokes by the very sound of his first name Eastern shams, while his surname draws attention to the nose (“le naze”), either to praise his flair in business or to an appendage predictive of a well-filled codpiece.5 The prologue confirms that Alcofrybas has all the qualities of a salacious smooth talker. It shows that in addition to being the so-called author of the work, he is a character within it, who from an early age was in the service of Pantagruel. Alcofrybas is therefore the narrator of the great deeds of Pantagruel (as his historiographer or his chronicler) as well as a full-fledged character, appearing at his pleasure within the narration in two well-known episodes, one concerning a walk around Parisian churches, undertaken in the company of Panurge (ch. 17), and the six-month long expedition in his master’s throat (ch. 32). It comes as no surprise, following this fantastic adventure, to see that he is the author of a Histoire des Gorgias (oc 333); the title sums up the extent of his field of action.6 A bad historian, he resembles Plato’s sophist more closely than he does Herodotus. Smooth talker, accustomed to the promotions and fairground methods that he uses in the prologue to Pantagruel to sell it as a remedy for all diseases, Alcofrybas is first a Gorgias of the public square, persuading by mixing hyperbole and insult or bet. Great lover of the throat, like Rabelais and his characters Grandgousier or Gargantua, Alcofrybas also knows that wine flows down it, laughter starts there, that it is above all the organ of the living language which he seeks to reproduce, rather than the written word, as important as that may be for the humanist. In this work of the spoken word, doubtless composed to be read aloud, we should be particularly aware of the physical presence of Alcofrybas whose remarkable voice punctuates to one

4 Cronique et histoire faicte et composée par reverend pere en dieu Turpin archeveque de Reims […] contenant les prouesses et faictz d’armes advenuz en son temps du très magnanime Roy Charles le grand, autrement dit Charlemagne et de son neveu Roland […] (Paris: 1527). 5 Guy Demerson, François Rabelais (Paris: 1991), 18. 6 Histoire des Gorgias at once evokes “gorge” (the throat), and Gorgias, subject and title of a Platonic dialogue and the eponymous Greek sophistic rhetor. [Translator’s note]

pantagruel

247

degree or another most of the work’s chapters. The bookish man, Rabelais, is also an adept of the living spoken word, to which we should lend an ear.7

2

Prologue

Beyond the techniques already touched upon—the pitchman, the rhetoric of the smooth talker—transforming readers into fascinated and amazed listeners, the few short pages of the prologue, producing an atmosphere very much like Paris street merchants crying their wares, are nonetheless a preface reflecting the whole book to follow and its readers. While seeming to give fulsome praise to help promote the Chroniques gargantuines only to replace them with a new work (Pantagruel), Alcofrybas draws attention to the fact that he and the book are there, “to augment your pastime further” (cw 134) [“accroistre” […] le “passe temps” (oc 215)]. A good book does good things, distraction has curative powers—it calms toothaches and for those struck with the pox, eases the pain of its treatments. It can also teach, for it has “more fruit […] than may be supposed by a whole great bunch of swashbucklers all covered with crusts” (cw 133).8 Hugues Salel’s dizain, placed at the start of the work in 1534, says the same thing in a more traditional and Horatian manner: Rabelais is among the writers “who both teach and entertain” (cw 132) [“mesle profit avec douceur” (oc 211)]. But Alcofrybas goes further, choosing among his readers, separating the good ones from the others, those unable to laugh, unable to let themselves go with the pleasure of the tale and its “jollities” (cw 133) [“joyeusetés” (oc 213)]. And yet he leaves well-inclined readers unsure, wondering: will there be something in this book other than inflated speeches and jokes? To begin to believe (even a little) in the nonsense he recounts, to take seriously the continual analogies offered (at least in the first 1532 version of the prologue) between the bible, Pantagruel or the Chroniques is to be the dupe of Alcofrybas? “These are no silly tales” (cw 133) [“Ce ne sont fariboles” (oc 214)], Alcofrybas tells us when recounting the most unbelievable stories. Worn-out tales of a smooth talker or, at the same time, true words inviting us to trust the fiction, to give it weight, an invitation to do as with the Bible, distinguishing between the tale as it is told, amusing and often unbelievable, and the higher meaning that might be attributed to it? We might think of Pantagruel, under its grotesque exterior, 7 As the narrator invites readers to consider: “What did he do? What did he do, my hearties? Listen” (cw 146) [“Que fist il? Qu’ il fist, mes bonnes gens, escoutez” (oc 228)]. 8 “Car il y a plus de fruict que paradventure ne pensent un tas de gros talvassiers tous croustelevez” (oc 213).

248

monferran and thomine

as a book of life, like the Gospel in many ways, reflecting in turn a manner of speaking and communicating, of learning, of living well with those to whom one is close, and with others.

3

Novelistic Structure

Marked by major changes in setting—from Utopia to France, and France to Utopia—the tale moves in the three stages already discussed, associated with in the roman de chevalerie. However, this simple division into three parts, aside from the fact that it hides the scope of the episode that takes place in Paris (ch. 7–22) and the prominence of the imaginary travel at the end of the novel (ch. 30, 32, and 33), does not take into account a structure that allows for a great deal of digression and many secondary plotlines, and which, once Panurge makes his appearance in chapter 9, incorporates a second protagonist. In response to these facts and to the frequent symmetry connecting chapters, Guy Demerson suggested understanding a rigorous organization of the whole of the work as a “concentric construction,” pointing out that Pantagruel is certainly more strongly structured than had long been believed.9 He brings attention to the relationship between the disputes settled one after another by Pantagruel and then by Panurge (ch. 10–13 and 18–20), to the letters sent by Gargantua, and by the lady Pantagruel was courting (ch. 9 and 24), to the episodes consecrated to the death (whether final or not) of Badebec and Epistemon (ch. 3 and 30). He also notes the similarities between the first chapter (where Hurtaly covers Noah’s Ark with his body) and chapter 32 (where Pantagruel uses his tongue to shelter his army), chapters 2 and 33 in which the story is situated respectively in the bowels of Badebec and Pantagruel. At the center of these symmetrical constructions, Rabelais placed the astonishing chapter 15 in which Panurge explains how to construct the walls of Paris by piling up female pudenda “in good architectural symmetry” (cw 183), a comic chapter staring Panurge as a merry fellow which it is also possible to interpret “in a higher sense” (cw 4), as a reflection of the harmony of the kingdom.10 At the same time, there is a strong connection joining some sequences, seeming to us stronger than the overall architecture, still to be fully understood. The organization of the episode, even when it is an echo or a counterpoint of another element in the tale, seems to be more important than that of the novel 9 10

Demerson, François Rabelais, 22–24. “[P]ar bonne symmeterye d’ architecture” (oc 268–269); “à plus hault sens” (G Prologue, 6).

pantagruel

249

as a whole. There are sequences, some of them autonomous, that we will consider here, attentive to the strange art of the early novel described by Milan Kundera: The dichotomy of themes and connections between the foreground and the background is unknown to Rabelais. […] That is what charmed me in his work and that of other early novelists. They express what fascinates them and stop when they are no longer fascinated. The freedom with which they compose is something I dream of: to write without creating suspense, without constructing a story and shaping its verisimilitude, to write without describing a time, a setting, or a town; to leave all that behind, remaining in contact only with what is essential, what is meaningful, to create a composition where connections and in-filling are not expected and where the novelist would not be forced to satisfy the form and its demands, to turn away for even a single line from what he holds dear, what fascinates him.11

4

The First Visit to Utopia, or Pantagruel’s Appearance in the Tale (ch. 1–4)

Focused on genealogy, the birth and the exploits of the young giant, the first four chapters are unsettling and intriguing for many reasons. This is less true of the fourth chapter, Alcofrybas’s merry account of the first “very frightful things” (cw 145) [“cas bien espouvantables” (oc 227)] done by the young giant, monstrous great deeds mostly concerning food, constructed as a mock-mythical account of the valorous heroes with added touches of the beginnings of humanist reflections (on the false wages delivered by a historical or hagiographic tale) or to attach recollections of Rabelais the father (and physician), sensitive to various stages of food consumption or behavior of the infant, mov11

“Pour Rabelais, la dichotomie des thèmes et des ponts, du premier et de l’arrière-plan est chose inconnue. […] C’ est ce qui m’enchantait chez lui et chez d’autres romanciers anciens: ils parlent de ce qu’ ils trouvent fascinant et ils s’arrêtent quand la fascination s’ arrête. Leur liberté de composition m’a fait rêver: écrire sans fabriquer un suspense, sans construire une histoire et simuler sa vraisemblance, écrire sans décrire une époque, un milieu, une ville; abandonner tout cela et n’être au contact que de l’essentiel; ce qui veut dire: créer une composition où des ponts et des remplissages n’auraient aucune raison d’ être et où le romancier ne serait pas obligé, pour satisfaire la forme et ses diktats, de s’ éloigner, même d’ une seule ligne, de ce qui lui tient à cœur, de ce qui le fascine.” Milan Kundera, Les testaments trahis (Paris: 1993), 189.

250

monferran and thomine

ing from milk to meat, from infantine babble to his first words, from swaddling to a body able to move freely, from a prone position to his first steps. The first three chapters are more surprising by their unexpected excrescences, grotesque swelling as a consequence of eating medlars, bringing along with that of the body, the irrepressible swelling of the liminary chapter with its list of 61 names. In a slightly different way, the second chapter, claiming to tell of “the nativity of the highly redoubtable Pantagruel” (cw 140) [“la nativité du tresredoubté Pantagruel” (oc 222)], turns into a long explanation of the extraordinary climatic conditions which held sway at the birth of the giant. As for the third chapter, beyond putting off yet again the first appearance of the eponymous hero, it swells with the odd contradictory monologue of Gargantua seized between mourning and glee, mourning for his wife and glee at the birth of his son. What is the purpose of this introductory section shaped by excess and digression? To awaken the readers’ curiosity about a slow-to-appear protagonist, barely glimpsed at the end of the second chapter? Certainly. To put, from the very start, language at the heart of the novel, including its capacity for growth as well as to mystify and entangle? Doubtless. To force readers to wonder about the meaning (or meanings) of these bizarre and eccentric comic episodes. Definitely. The kinds of interpretations that the first chapter has invited are a form of proof. Bringing readers back to “the beginning of the world” (cw 137), it seems like a very burlesque reworking of Genesis where medlars take the place of the forbidden fruit, except for the detail that the consequence of eating them, far from a fall, is rather a comic swelling.12 Pantagruel’s genealogy is integrated into that of the giants of the Bible, mixed with mythological ones and others found in medieval romans. This is clearly a parody. A parody of contemporary lists intended to prove the Trojan origins of the French found in the work of Annius of Viterbo or Lemaire de Belges, at the same time a parody of biblical genealogies, especially the genealogy of Christ (Matt 1:1–17). The grotesque rewriting of the biblical text is still felt in the second chapter. For a time, it was interpreted as proof of Rabelais’s supposed “rationalist faith.”13 The liberties it takes lie within a broad monastic—especially Franciscan—tradition.14 It should surely be understood as Rabelais’s way of mocking those who under12

13 14

“[A]u commencement du monde” (oc 217). See André Tournon, “En sens agile”: Les acrobaties de l’ esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: 1995), 156–157. For the references implicated in this genealogy, see Huchon’s very complete notes in oc, especially n. 1, 1239–1241. “[F]oi rationaliste”: Abel Lefranc. Etienne Gilson, Rabelais franciscain (Paris: 1924).

pantagruel

251

stood the sacred text only literally, inviting a less rigid reading of it. In that spirit, he gently mocks the endless genealogies and the children born late in their Old Testament fathers’ lives, making Gargantua, a new Abraham, engender his son “at the age of four hundred four score and forty-four years,” (cw 140) [“en son eage de quatre cens quatre vingts quarante et quatre ans” (oc 222)], an age which is as problematic biologically as it is arithmetically. Edwin Duval is sensitive both to the distance Rabelais creates from a literal reading and to the close analogy he constructs between his novel and the biblical text. Based on this chapter, he proposes an allegorical reading of the text, making Pantagruel a sort of Messiah, a new Christ who sets out to redeem the sin of Cain. Here he points out that Pantagruel’s genealogy is the only one of the novel’s three lists not to have changed from edition to edition, and that the stable number, 61, can be understood in terms of Christ’s ancestors who, counting from Adam, number 62.15 The third chapter is also a parody, clearly a central mode of the novel which, as it is destabilizing, obliges readers to consider what the real aim might be, inviting them to return to the question of language and meaning. Expressions of grief found in the roman de chevalerie are parodied; Gargantua’s words, arranged as a series of antitheses, are also and especially, a parody of disputatio, the traditional scholastic exercise resting on a method of pro and contra, in which the giant is snarled, tangled in his own syllogisms. Openly critical, parody here is used to undercut an exercise that is of no use in identifying truth, where formalistic oratory is disconnected from any moral goals and is of no help to the deeply perplexed giant. However, Gargantua, “transported elsewhere” (cw 143), resolves his dilemma at the end of the chapter by accepting in a way that is both comic and profoundly Christian, to live, to choose joy, to hope for God and life after death. He is, it would seem, the very figure of Jesus—whose name Gargantua pronounces in the first version of the novel—who allows him to escape his aporia, reminding him that a Christian’s legitimate distress at the death of Christ should be resolved by the assurance of resurrection and eternal life. It echoes Clément Marot’s contemporary thoughts on grief, even if Rabelais does not go as far as the author of the Déploration sur le trépas de Florimond Robertet (1528), who rejected funerals. Gargantua, it should be noted, did not attend his wife’s burial, but allowed midwifes to go. The chapter closes on the discussion of this important question without pontificating.

15

Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven: 1991).

252 5

monferran and thomine

The Making of a Man, a Giant, a Prince: Transmission, Education, Knowledge, and Apprenticeships (ch. 5–8)

At the end of the fourth chapter, Pantagruel breaks out of the cradle that reduced to him to the status of an animal and is symbolically welcomed at the adults’ table, also the table of the king and his lords. He is well endowed by nature—as his insatiable hunger suggests—and the time has now come to teach him to control his desires, to know the advantages of an education that—without spoiling his natural endowments—will enable him to regulate them and put them to good use. It is time for interiorized ties to replace the physical urges that restricted him. The chapters that follow will turn the giant nursling motivated by anarchic drives into a man, or better still, a prince who will be called upon to rule. Readers are, after all, asked to follow “the deeds of the noble Pantagruel” (cw 147), as the title of chapter 5 reminds us. Rabelais’s first novel, just like his second, should be read as a “mirror for princes,” considering the qualities and skills the humanist sovereign might be expected to acquire. Gargantua’s famous letter lists moral and spiritual qualities: “virtue, honor, and valor” (cw 160), “faith formed of charity” (cw 162).16 In addition to the intellectual education which occupies much of the letter, knowing that someday he will have to leave behind “this tranquility and repose of study” (cw 161) [“ceste tranquillité et repos d’estude” (oc 245)], Gargantua reminds his son to learn the skills needed for knighthood. When he begins to taste university life, the giant has barely left childhood games behind, and Rabelais evokes the topos of the wanderings of wise men that Thaumaste will elaborate on in his speech to Pantagruel (oc 281–282) as well as geography (chapter 5 reads in part like a tourist guide), and above all contemporary reality (young nobles commonly visited several universities). This peregrinatio academica brings Pantagruel in contact with no less than ten universities, taking him one after another to Poitiers, then Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Avignon, Valence, Angers, Bourges, Orleans, and finally to Paris. He arrives there in chapter 7, having already met, as he left Orleans, a student who had just come from the capital, representing the kind of education given by the Sorbonne (chapter 6). But this circuit turns out to be anything but a success in terms of learning. The travel tale that might have been expected is cut short, transformed into a critical and satirical catalogue of discontinuous anecdotes. Experiences pile up (recalling the piles of books in the Library of Saint-Victor) without resulting in any real knowledge. Pantagruel spends his early days in

16

“[V]ertu, honesteté et preudhommie” (oc 243); “foy formée de charité” (oc 245).

pantagruel

253

nothing but entertainments; the letter from his father in chapter 8 is like a call to order. In Poitiers, where he went to study, he put in place La Pierre levée where banquets would be held; in Toulouse he learns dancing and swordplay; in Montpellier, he decides not to study medicine or law; in Avignon, he falls in love; the first progress is not registered until he comes “to Bourges, where he studied quite a long time, and learned a lot in the law school” (cw 149) [“estudi[er] bien long temps et proffit[er] beaucoup en la faculté des loix” (oc 231)]. Hidden beneath this pleasant and picturesque depiction of student life lie a humanist critique of traditional universities and their instruction and perhaps also a call, echoing the ideas of Budé, for an encyclopedic education, questioning the need for separation by discipline or profession.17 Pantagruel, and Rabelais behind him, uses this as the basis of a vigorous criticism of the use of glosses in the law, describing contemporary law books as resembling a fine golden gown, “bordered with shit” (cw 149) [“brodée de merde” (oc 231)], giving as an example Accursus, whom Budé and Tiraqueau considered to be among those who were non commentatores, sed tormentatores juris. Like them, Rabelais hopes a distinction will be made between the texts of Roman law themselves and the glosses on them, a position in keeping with the mos gallicus.18 The humanist critique of education is maintained as the giant’s adventures continue. In the following chapter, the Limousin student in turn embodies just the opposite of knowledge or a good life. His pedantry only masks the triviality of his actions, as his imperfect Latin reveals misuse of a language employed not to communicate but for self-glorification. His jargon, a caricature of the scholastic Latin humanists decried, equally distorts Latin and French, and so contrasts to proper use of French and to the beauties of classical Latin. By doing so, the Limousin student provokes Pantagruel’s anger. Would the giant show less discernment faced with the ‘Library of Saint-Victor’? He proclaims it “most magnificent, especially certain books he found in it” (cw 153) [“fort magnificque, mesmement d’aulcuns livres qu’il y trouva” (oc 236)]. Its catalogue is an astonishing list, considerably embellished from one edition to the next (72 titles were added in 1534), a list that gives free rein to Rabelais’s imaginative and satiric verve. The monks of Saint Victor, hostile to Erasmus and the

17

18

Huchon, “Rabelais, les universités et la mobilité: Les phantasmes du Pantagruel à des fins de propagande,” in Les échanges entre les universités européennes à la Renaissance, eds. M. Bideaux and M.-M. Fragonard (Geneva: 2003), 143–158. The mos gallicus or ‘Gaulish method,’ was a reform movement in legal studies, a French style of legal exegesis founded on a philological and historical approach to Roman texts, introduced by Andrea Alciato, an Italian jurist who taught at Bourges; Budé’s work spread the method. See Screech, Rabelais, 74–86.

254

monferran and thomine

humanist current, are set up here as the emblem of an outmoded theology. The books in their library are just like those Gargantua took in under his first, and bad, instructor, Thubal Holoferne. The first novel says nothing about Pantagruel actually reading them, and Benjamin Lazar, in his recent production, chose instead to have Pantagruel consume as many biscuits, carefully arranged in a tiny box/library, as there were titles to be happily devoured.19 The humanist message is most distinctly expressed in the famous letter from Gargantua to his son Pantagruel, presented to most French high school students as emblematic of the French Renaissance; some fragments are committed to memory. Prince Pantagruel is called upon by his father to become a humanist in the original sense of the term: he urges him to the studia humanitatis, the study of ancient languages and literatures, especially Greek and Latin. “Now all branches of learning are reestablished, languages restored: Greek, without which it is shameful for a man to call himself learned; Hebrew, Chaldean, Latin” (cw 160).20 This impressive plan of study, attached to a consideration of transmission and heritage, is debatable, however. Are we to take this as a humanist manifesto or a stylistic exercise parodying sententious letters and piling on commonplaces?21 The contradictory interpretations of this letter draw our attention to an essential principle of Rabelais’s novel, one that complicates its exegesis: it is never the voice of Rabelais that is heard in his works; they are filled with multiple voices, but these are always those of his characters or the narrator, who, even when, from the Third Book on, he appears without the mask of Alcofrybas Nasier, is a constructed figure, a stylized alterego of François Rabelais. Taking this as a point of departure, should we—and how far should we—trust what his comic figures say? The letter is Gargantua’s, not Rabelais’s, and we would do well to judge it by the measures of the story itself, and the indices it provides, even when these are contradictory. Pantagruel responds to the letter with immediate enthusiasm, described by an extended fire metaphor: Pantagruel “was inflamed more than ever to profit,” “his mind among the books was like fire amid the heather, so tireless and enthusiastic it was” (cw 162).22 But before the young prince, “fully mindful of his father’s letter

19 20 21 22

Pantagruel, a play presented in 2013 at the Théâtre de Cornouaille-Scène nationale in Quimper; see Nicolas Le Cadet, “Rabelais en scène,” ar 1 (2017): 475–482. “Maintenant toutes disciplines sont restituées, les langues instaurées, Grecque sans laquelle c’ est honte que une personne se die sçavant, Hebraïcque, Caldaïcque, Latine” (oc 243). For more details, see Gérard Milhe Poutingon’s overview in François Rabelais: Bilan critique (Paris: 1996), 71. Pantagruel “feut enflambé proffiter plus que jamais,” “tel estoit son esperit entre les livres, comme est le feu parmy les brandes, tant il l’ avoit infatigable et strident” (oc 246).

pantagruel

255

and admonitions,” could prepare “to test out his learning” (cw 167), his improbable encounter with the good-for-nothing Panurge takes place, and he forgets his Greek and Latin on the spot.23 Gargantua’s plan, as fervent and magnificent as it is, remains first of all and above all, something written in Utopia, as the giant reminds us at the closing of his letter. The opposition between two kinds of education (stultifying scholastic schooling; modern encyclopedic education open to the world) will have a structural function in Gargantua where it will be organized as a diptych. It is already present in Pantagruel, but in a less didactic and at the same time more complex mode. The episode devoted to education makes its way from old knowledge, stuck on the shelves of the Library of Saint-Victor or in juridical glosses, to new knowledge, promoted in Gargantua’s letter bearing the living word. This letter in turn stresses the gulf separating the education of the father, when the times were not suitable to access to classical learning, and that available to the son thanks to the widespread transmission of print. Finally, the Limousin student, consensual victim of a sclerotic university, is opposed in two symmetrical scenes presented as theatrical sketches, to the polyglot Panurge, one of “today’s […] adventurers […] more learned than the scholars” (cw 160) [“avanturiers […] de maintenant plus doctes que les docteurs” (oc 244)] of Gargantua’s days, a kind of symbol of what is new.24 However, this high-contrast overview is not always so clear-cut. Humanism itself does not escape all criticism. It is possible to read the Limousin student as incarnating the temptation of purity, while Panurge, by his disruptive entrance into the story, overturns the paternal recommendations to flee “the company of those you don’t want to resemble” (cw 162) [“les compagnies de gens esquelz tu ne veulx point ressembler” (oc 245)]. The linguistic adventure played out here—going from macaronic Latin (“Majoris de modo faciendi boudinos”) of the books in the catalogue of the SaintVictor library to the Latinized French of the Ciceronian from Limoges, ending with the Classical, vernacular, or fictive languages produced by Panurge—has no clear lesson except what makes Pantagruel angry or pleased in one case or another.25 But, the hero’s interest aside, Rabelais’s composition, although not without connections to Panurge’s curiosity, virtuosity, and linguistic inventiveness, sometimes comes close to the Limousin student’s Latin-based French. It

23 24 25

“[B]ien records des lettres et admonition de son père,” […] “essayer son sçavoir” (oc 250). See Tournon, “Le ‘langage usité’ selon Rabelais: Norme ou repère?,” in Les normes du dire au xvie siècle, eds. J.-C. Arnould and G. Milhe Poutingon (Paris: 2004), 453–467. Folengo, in his Baldus, provides a model of macaronica verba. Macaronic practice involves giving Latin forms to vernacular terms. The Limousin student, as Tournon notes, does just the reverse, giving Latin words vernacular forms.

256

monferran and thomine

dips into one or the other kind of excess and fantasy, alternating hybrid and expressive creations where evil-doers are “diaboliculating” or “monorticulating” (cw 245), where Panurge will try to “push-thrust-straddle” the Parisian lady (cw 204), mixed with a fair number of Hellenisms and Latinisms.26 Rabelais’s questioning of language also takes the form of a play on form seen from the first chapters. Rabelais mixes genres connecting the written word to spoken language; the tale itself, included in an overarching dialogue between the narrator and readers, alternates with direct or indirect discourse; prose and poetry (Badebec’s epitaph, the blazon of the students at the University of Orleans) are found side by side, along with lists, theatrical dialogues, a letter, and in the continuation of Pantagruel’s adventures, exposés and speeches; the serious and the facetious intermingle; the fervent, serious high style of the letter contrasts with the extravagant list that precedes it as with the dialogue (or rather, the absence of dialogue) that immediately follows it. Like his hero, now in contact with a range of languages and knowledge, Rabelais tries from the start to make his first novel a world encompassing the greatest possible number of words and forms. This initial urge continues to the end: in the books that follow, heterogeneity of genres, styles, and discourse, typical of the novel, will only increase.27 Inventiveness and lexical profusion are already visible in the various reworkings of Pantagruel, each in turn more varied and more open to the creation of new, more astonishing and surprising words.

6

The Double-Headed Novel: Panurge and Pantagruel in Paris (ch. 9–24)

The Parisian period, indicted by a few external elements, is an essential stage in the novel which is, like many others, enigmatic. It is bracketed by two letters, the first, from father to son, presenting a plan of study whose results will not be seen, the second, which Pantagruel receives from the Parisian lady, serves as a conclusion but its contents are so subtle as to be invisible, no part of it is revealed to readers.28 At this point, the book is inflected by Panurge, joined by secondary characters whose voices we hear for the first time: Epistemon,

26 27 28

“[D]iabliculant,” “monorticulant” (oc 337); “boutte[r] poussenjamb [er]” (oc 293). See the “Notice sur la langue de Rabelais,” in oc, especially pp. xlv–li. Mikhail Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, trans. M. Holquist (Austin, TX: 1981); Esthétique et théorie du roman, trans. D. Olivier (Paris: 1978). Daniel Martin, “Panurge lapidaire: Une lecture de Pantagruel, chapitre xxiv,” Bulletin de l’ Association d’ étude sur l’ humanisme, la réforme et la renaissance 58 (2004): 43–57.

pantagruel

257

the learned, Eudemon, the lucky, Carpalim, the speedy, Eusthenes, the sturdy, who will accompany Pantagruel in the rest of his adventures. Panurge’s meeting with Pantagruel is exemplary:29 it creates “a new pair in friendship” (cw 166) [“un nouveau pair d’amitié” oc 249], a couple whom Pantagruel choses to compare to Aeneas and Achates but which is mainly an essential gear moving Rabelais’s comic universe. The two characters are opposing and complementary, the stroke of genius being to unite under the same syllable, Pan, at the start of both names, characters with different physiques and social status. The fact that Pantagruel is a giant is easily forgotten, while Panurge is a man “of medium height, neither too tall nor too small” (cw 186) [“homme de stature moyenne, ni trop grand, ni trop petit” (oc 272)]. The fact that one is a Prince and the other seems to have no particular place in the social hierarchy is equally forgotten as the relations between master and disciple are overturned. The thirsty one and the hungry one will be as inseparable as were Baldus and Cingar in Folengo’s Liber Macaronices or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the century following.30 The comings and goings of the two heroes structure the whole episode. The scene in which they meet seems to interrupt the account of the life of Pantagruel and of his great deeds with a digression, stressed by the opening lines of the next chapter where Pantagruel recalls “his father’s letter and admonitions” (cw 167) [“lettres et admonition de son pere” (oc 250)], while Panurge, who has barely appeared, disappears completely until chapter 13. Just like the encounter with the Limousin student, it is involved in the events, echoing them. Symmetry rules, the performances reflect one another, Baisecul and Humevesne’s dispute is ended by Pantagruel while that with Thaumaste is settled by Panurge, the two protagonists competing for a reputation from which they both derive pride. When Pantagruel defends his theses at the faculty of arts, and then at the Sorbonne, “everyone began sounding off and talking about his marvelous learning” (cw 167), and, like a new Demosthenes, he takes pleasure in being recognized on the street.31 Thaumaste, the cleric, having come from England at the news of Pantagruel’s “most inestimable learning” (cw 194) [“sçavoir tant inestimable” (oc 282)], demonstrated during the disagreement between my lords Baisecul and Humevesne, accepts an offer to argue with Panurge by signs, which causes the latter to “to get a reputation around the town of Paris” (cw 203) [“estre en

29 30

31

Jean Rousset, Leurs yeux se rencontrèrent: La scène de première vue dans le roman (Paris: 1989), 17–19. Theofilo Folengo’s Baldus is a recognized source of Pantagruel. See the recent bilingual edition, Baldo, trans. A.E. Mullaney (I Tatti Renaissance Library) 25, 36, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 2007–2008). “[T]out le monde commença à bruyre et parler de son sçavoir si merveilleux” (oc 251).

258

monferran and thomine

reputation en la ville de Paris” (oc 291)]. In much the same way, their relationships with women are similar: each has his own manner of courting a lady, each writes or receives a letter. This symmetry is also apparent on the larger scale of the novel: Panurge’s infantile and superstitious prayer (oc, ch. 14, 264) is the grotesque counterpoint of Pantagruel’s evangelical prayer (oc, ch. 29, 317–318). The parallels allow the narrator to have the giant disappear when he wishes (and so to preserve his innocence). In just this way, Alcofrybas replaces Pantagruel when the alms boxes are stolen from Paris churches. This is only one of many practical jokes played by Panurge who would seem to be among the dubious types Gargantua mentions in his letter, astounded that they should be at present “more learned than the scholars of [his] time […] brigands, hangmen, adventurers, and grooms” (cw 160); so one would think if Pantagruel did not remark on his fine stature and elegance, his rich and noble ancestors.32 There is no external sign of the nobility Pantagruel sees in him, he carries no sword other than a flagon of wine hidden under his cloak and an odd piece of ham (cw 182; oc 267). He is in the tradition of European jokesters and wily characters such as Renart, Pierre Faifeu, Till Eulenspiegel, the Italian picaresque heroes of Pulci and Folengo, wily ancients like Mercury or Ulysses, and his close kin, the Parisian poet François Villon, whose best-known verse he cites: “mais où sont les neiges d’antan” (oc 265) “but where are the snows of yesteryear?” (cw 181). He draws inspiration from medieval theater, most directly from the famous Farce de Maître Pathelin when he plays a practical joke on Pantagruel, a radical means of meeting him: like Pathelin, who, when the draper comes looking for the money due him, pretends to be ill and delirious, speaking all kinds of languages, he enacts a polyglot farce for Pantagruel and his men, speaking real or invented languages, in turn German, something Oriental, Italian, Scots, Basque, Lanternese, Dutch, Spanish, Danish, Hebrew, ending with ancient Greek, Utopian, and Latin. This is farce for the sheer pleasure of the thing; Rabelais expanded on it, adding Scots, Basque, Lanternese, and Danish to the languages already in the first edition. It is also revelatory: Pantagruel was deaf to the thirteen-times repeated request of Panurge, whose face he describes to his companions in terms of lack and indigence, and which yet attracted his interest. His philosophy and his learning, newly acquired, are not yet connected to the realities of the world; despite his father’s advice, he would not have been able to apply charity—the charity to which Panurge, in his own way, would return with his fable of the lion and the fox (cw, ch. 15, 184–185; oc 269–271).

32

Aujourd’ hui “plus doctes que les docteurs et les prescheurs de [son] temps […] les brigans, les boureaulx, les avanturiers, les palefreniers” (oc 244).

pantagruel

259

The man whom he sees for the first time is hungry and would like to eat before recounting his adventures. Yet, instead of understanding this need, Pantagruel, philosophical, seeks information. Panurge’s behavior points up the insufficiencies of Pantagruel: bookish speculation and lack of common sense. Even if they will later walk together speculating, “in the manner of the Peripatetics” (cw 194) [“à la mode des Peripateticques” (oc 281)], what follows, their Parisian adventures, corroborates the difference between the bookish giant, somewhat stuck in his self-assurance, and a carefree creature of imagination. At that moment, duped and manipulated, Pantagruel, rather than being angry, pledges eternal friendship to Panurge. Here we see an essential element of his character, part of the definition of Pantagruelism, to be deepened in the succeeding novels. He knows how to take a joke: “All things he took in good part […]; never did he torment himself, never did he take offense” (cw 237, 264) [“Toutes choses prenoit en bonne partie […]. Jamais ne se tourmentoit, jamais ne se scandalizoit” (oc, 329, 357)]. This ‘Pantagruelist’ attitude is also the position readers are expected to take. As André Tournon remarked, “one does not scowl in front of a clown.”33 Pantagruel asks for “a few hogsheads of good wine” as payment for having judged the lawsuit between Baisecul and Humevesne, where he demonstrated fearsome authority, threatening to tear off the plaintiff’s head if he did not tell the truth. We are invited to share laughter and the taste of wine alongside the two protagonists. Pantagruel drinks these “few hogsheads of good wine […] pretty well,” and Panurge “valiantly” (cw 178) [“quelques muitz de bon vin […] assez bien” […]; “vaillamment” (oc 263)]. “Panurge, what do you have to laugh about?” (cw 179) [“Panurge, qu’est-ce qu’avez à rire?” (oc 263)], asks Pantagruel in the same episode. Panurge, “the most troubling of Rabelais’s inventions,”34 is a very ambivalent figure. Our curiosity may be stimulated during the scene where they meet, yet we need to wait until chapter 14 to learn about his adventures among the Turks and chapter 16 to have a complete physical and moral picture of him—he is the only one of Rabelais’s characters who is accorded such a depiction. Subject to the disease of the penniless, he is presented as “somewhat of a lecher” (cw 186) [“quelque peu paillard” (oc 272)], confirmed by the events that follow. His costume is marked by a long codpiece about which he intends to write a book entitled On the convenience of long codpieces (cw 186) [De la commodité des 33 34

“On ne fronce pas les sourcils devant un clown.” Tournon, “Le Pantagruélisme, mode de lecture du Tiers Livre,” Littératures 33 (1995): 5–16. “[L]a plus déroutante invention de Rabelais.” Daniel Ménager, Rabelais en toutes lettres (Paris: 1989), 43.

260

monferran and thomine

longues braguettes (oc 272)]. During his debate by signs with Thaumaste (ch. 19) it becomes a magical object. Encouraged by his triumph over the English cleric, his codpiece becomes even more important, he “had it decorated with Roman style embroidery” (cw 203) [“la faisant au dessus esmoucheter de broderie à la Romanicque” (oc 291)]. Coupling being one of his favorite subjects, he imagines walls constructed of “women’s whatchamacallits in this part of the country” (cw 183) and all “those stiffened weapons that dwell on claustral codpieces” (ibid.), uses the money he earned from the crusade to marry off old women, explains that leagues are smaller in the Île de France than elsewhere because they were measured by young couples who “friggle-fraggled at every little field” (cw 210).35 “[A]n evildoer, cheat, boozer, idler, robber, if any there was in Paris, and for the rest the nicest guy in the world” (cw 186), this ragged fellow shows over and over that he is amazingly intelligent.36 Panurge is an erudite rascal, a wise fool, who upends notions of learning.37 From his first appearance he takes on the role of friend of Pantagruel, but he is also a sophist, using words to manipulate his interlocutor. His “real and proper baptismal name” (cw 166) [“vrai et propre nom de baptême” (oc 249)] declares this ambivalence: Panurge evokes the Greek panourgos, someone prepared to do anything. In Greek, the adjective may designate someone who is especially active and industrious, or contrariwise, someone who is crafty and nasty, making bad use of his capacities. Panurge is also the creator of “a thousand devilish little tricks” (cw 188) [“mille petites diableries” (oc 274)], generally in bad taste, which the narrator enjoys listing: he puts turds in the hats of the professors of the Faculty of arts, concocts emetics, whips pages, cuts purses, etc. (ch. 16). He is the embodiment of a kind of knowledge oriented neither to humility nor to seeking truth, and his malice often bursts forth. Although he was certainly very badly treated by the Turks who transformed him into a new, grotesque Saint Lawrence, setting him to roast covered with pieces of lard, he avenged himself cruelly by setting fire to their city, a sight he “turned around to the rear, like Lot’s wife” and regarded with “high glee” (cw 181–182) [“grand liesse” […] se “retourne arriere, comme la femme de Loth” (oc 266–267)]. He is vengeful, using fire, and the dogs that he manipulates to the greatest distress of the Parisian lady avenge him

35

36 37

Construites des “callibistrys des femmes de ce pays” […], des “bracquemars enroiddys qui habitent par les braguettes claustrales” (oc 268–269); “franfreluchoient à chaque bout de champ” (oc 298–299). “Malfaisant, pipeur, beuveur, bateur de pavez, ribleur s’il en estoit à Paris: au demourant le meilleur filz du monde” (oc 272). A “trouble-sapience” [someone who challenges received knowledge], in other words, the inverse of a spoilsport. The formulation is Tournon’s, “En sens agile,” 26.

pantagruel

261

for the dogs who attacked him in Turkey. Later, he will deal with King Anarche, by making him a cryer of green sauce (ch. 31). Disrespectful and subversive, he decries all of society’s hypocrisies, like those ruling relationships between lovers. His attempted seduction of a Parisian coquette fails, and he promises the worst of humiliations to his victim, who has played the codified role of inaccessible lady. He is empowered, exercising his libido dominandi on all women, on the “high and mighty” (cw 196) [“glorieux” (oc 284)] Thaumaste, whom he mocks, and no doubt also on “master Lord Pantagruel” (cw 197), of whom he yet presents himself as the “little pupil” (cw 197) [“petit disciple” (oc 285)]. He takes over as ‘usurper’ of the diegesis, supplanting Pantagruel and competing with Alcofrybas since the Prince of Utopia makes them both chatelain of Salmigondin.38 The head of “the castleship of Salmagundi” (cw 241) [“chatellenie de Salmigondin” (oc 333)], a title granted Alcofrybas, when he emerged from his excursion into the mouth of the giant (ch. 32), will devolve to Panurge in the continuation of these adventures (tb, ch. 2). Panurge is a teller of tales who is an astonishing (diabolic?) master of discourse. At their first face-to-face meeting, Pantagruel’s words are measured, clear, laconic, whereas the inspired genius of Panurge shows off lively sweet talk, an endless flow of words. He himself recounts “the way in which he escaped from the hands of the Turks” (cw 178) [“comment il eschappa de la main des Turcs” (oc 262)], rivaling the narrator’s skill at telling a tale. Like the narrator, he is master of dialogue, imprints his presence on a tale spiced with credible details, small real facts, no doubt seducing his listeners. The giant, wanting to know how he “handled the pasha” (cw 181) [“a accoustré [s]on Baschatz” (oc 265)], asks him to come to the end of his story. While walking in Paris, Panurge “teaches a very new way of building the walls of Paris” (cw 182), continuing directly with the fable of the lion and the fox, and then with an anecdote inspired by Aesop—each of them expressions of his misogyny.39 His meeting with Alcofrybas is exactly at the midpoint of the book in its 1542 version (ch. 17). It too has many lessons: Alcofrybas, having come down 38

39

Gérard Defaux offers this analysis in “De Pantagruel au Tiers Livre: Panurge et le pouvoir,” er 13 (1976): 170–172; see also his Pantagruel et les sophistes. Contribution à l’histoire de l’ humanisme chrétien au xvie siècle (The Hague: 1973), 178ff. “Il enseigne une maniere bien nouvelle de bastir les murailles de Paris” (oc 267). Is this misogyny shared by Rabelais? The question remains unresolved. For Nadine KupertyTsur, Rabelais here questions the way men look at women: “De l’hybridité générique au sens: Genre, sexe et construction du savoir dans le chapitre 15 de Pantagruel,” in Rabelais ou les adventures des gens curieux: L’hybridité des récits rabelaisiens. Actes du colloque de Montréal, 2006 (Geneva: 2017), 249–262. See also François Cornilliat’s contribution to the present volume.

262

monferran and thomine

from his omniscient narrator’s pedestal, now learns of events at the same time as readers, by means of ‘subjective realism,’ making the tale especially amusing. The frenetic church visits Panurge carries out could make him seem to be feigning piety if we did not soon learn of his tricks and thefts, as well as their double intentions. This episode, which progresses from enigma to enigma, by that very fact, warns the reader not to trust appearances. Imitating Cingar, Folengo’s hero, Panurge steals from alms boxes. He applies an imaginative exegesis of the New Testament to justify his action: Diliges Dominum, Dilige, Centuplum accipies. To support his analysis, Panurge engages rabbis and commentators on the Old Testament. His use of Hebrew here is notably twisted, far from what Gargantua had in mind when he advised his son to study the language. Panurge’s wild explanation touches on what was at stake in major questions of the period, notably, how to interpret the bible, a source of deep religious disputes. The scene’s comic aspects serve its moral and religious ends: a critique of indulgences and pardons as well as exegeses colored by bad faith. If Panurge’s fraudulent aims are shameful (he robs the ecclesiastical treasury), they are based on a deeper swindle, that of the Church itself, which plays with God and believers, whence no doubt the almost admiring good will the narrator has for Panurge, as indeed does Pantagruel. He is a sublime thief, an admirable no-good, a man who jests (using both practical jokes and verbal tricks), a magician who boasts of possessing a philosopher’s stone that draws money to him from purses, a rhetor, stunning his audience with his sophistry, his knowledge, and his mastery of language, a free and troubling character who refuses Alcofrybas’s generosity because he wants to remain master of his actions and to enjoy his freedom—a suspect freedom, because it is really a source of disorganization. Although dying of hunger and thirst, he refused Pantagruel’s generosity when the latter, upon first seeing him, took pity on him (ch. 9). Clearly, he is not as black a character as some critics have made him out to be.40 It is noteworthy that Pantagruel is readily amused by Panurge’s jokes. Is this a sign that as humanist prince the giant became familiar with the spirit of pranks? When the walls of Paris are scaffolded by “women’s whatchamacallits” he bursts out laughing (ch. 15); when Panurge invites him to take in the spectacle of the Parisian lady pissed on by dogs, he comments on “the show, which he found very fine and novel” (cw 208) [“mystere […] fort beau et nouveau” (oc 297)], while the narrator speaks of “the dirtiest mess in the world” (cw 208)

40

For an overview of the various critical interpretations of the character, and for her analysis of Panurge’s voice, see Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, “Hors toute intimidation”: Panurge ou la parole singulière, (er) 41 (Geneva: 2003).

pantagruel

263

[“la plus grande villanie du monde” (oc 296)]. In the same way he will laugh at the fate his acolyte reserves for King Anarche (ch. 31). Panurge brings a human element and experience to the novel. Finally, as soon as he appears, he poses a question which is central for Rabelais: of language and communication. By using 14 distinct tongues—if we include French, his “native mother tongue” (cw 166) [“langue naturelle, et maternelle” (oc 249)]—he immediately confronts his interlocutors with Babelism, running the risk of being incomprehensible, something already seen in the encounter with the Limousin student and the list of books in the SaintVictor library. However, intelligibility and pertinence41 will be even more compromised in the dispute between Baisecul and Humevesne, built around a strong satire of the workings of justice. Pantagruel has no interest in “the briefsacks and documents” (cw 168) [“sacs et pantarques” (oc 252)] in which all legal cases end up. Having had all the papers burned, he calls the two gentlemen personally before him to hear “vive vocis oraculo [directly from the oracle] the disagreement in question” (cw 176).42 This direct speech, more trustworthy than written forms, is nevertheless constructed of non sequiturs, the influence of the poetic form known as the coq-à-l’âne.43 Pantagruel replies in the same vein, demonstrating to all “a masterpiece of wisdom” (cw 178) [“chief d’ œuvre de prudence” (oc 262)]. Beyond the juridical domain, communication becomes an issue most acutely when treating questions of love. Courting the Parisian lady, Panurge opposes conventional gallantry, whose artifice he denounces, with an invented language reflecting his own preoccupations. His hyperbolic tirade ends on a comic note, reversing everything: “So, to save time, let’s pushthrust-straddle!” (cw 204) [“Doncques pour gaigner temps boutte poussenjambions” (oc 293)]. Pantagruel, in turn (ch. 23–24), receives a letter he cannot read from the lady “whom he had been close to for a good length of time” (cw 210) [qu’il a “entretenue bonne espace de temps” (oc 299)].

41 42 43

Gérard Milhe Poutingon, François Rabelais, Pantagruel (Paris: 2010), 84–89. Afin d’ “ouy[r] (vive vocis oraculo) le different dont est question” (oc 260). Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007), 146–153. From the linguistic coq-à-l’âne it is but a short step to Thaumaste’s doing the same thing in gestures; in both cases, critics have noted a strong influence of farce.

264 7

monferran and thomine

The War against the Dipsodes (ch. 24–31)

The outcome of the war is clear from the start as the book’s title declares that Pantagruel is “King of the Dipsodes.” And when, at the same time, we learn that Gargantua has been “translated” to Fairyland (cw 209) and that the Dipsodes crossed their borders to invade Utopia (ch. 23), we are less concerned about the outcome than impatient to see Pantagruel and his companions leave Paris so that we might enjoy the “frightful deeds and exploits” (cw 131) [“faictz et prouesses espouventables” oc 209] promised by the title. The epic spirit at the origins of the novel quite naturally brings it to include war. Panurge, from his first appearance in the narrative, has several marks of the epic hero: his geste begins in medias res; his noble origins are recognizable under his rags; he explains his identity in keeping with epic ritual, before telling Pantagruel the tale of his “adventures, which are more wonderful than those of Ulysses” (cw 166) [“fortunes, qui sont plus merveilleuses que celles de Ulysses” (oc 249)]. The novel is dotted with echoes of the Aeneid, starting with the friendship of Aeneas and Achates (cw 166), going on to the image of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises superimposed on the Giants carrying off King Anarche “around their neck” (cw 225) [“à leur col” (oc 316)], including also Dido and Aeneas whom Epistemon recalls to Pantagruel when he is distressed not to have bidden his lady farewell (ch. 24). Before starting to recount the battle (ch. 28) the narrator calls on the muses of epic (Calliope) and comedy (Thalia), a pleasant wink at the grandiloquence of epic invocations. The tradition of the roman de chevalerie is also implicitly present: Pantagruel repeats its structure, various motifs, and narrative traits, deconstructing them from within: the “three hundred giants” (cw 217) [oc 306] and their captain as well as the Dipsodes themselves and their pashas with their Oriental flavor.44 The hero’s combat with Loupgarou is modeled on the battle between Roland and Ferragus in PseudoTurpin’s Chronicle (ch. 29).45 The narrator describes military operations by a play at simultaneous narration using formulae taken from this genre: “Let us leave Pantagruel and his followers and talk of King Anarche and his army” (cw 223); “Now let’s go back to good old Pantagruel and tell how he behaved in this affair” (cw 223).46 Based on these elements, Edwin Duval describes Pantagruel

44 45 46

Jean Céard, “Rabelais, lecteur et juge des romans de chevalerie,” er 21 (1988): 237–248. Céard, “Rabelais, les fables de Turpin et les exemples de saint Nicolas,” in Etudes seiziémistes offertes à Monsieur le Professeur V.L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1980), 91–109. “Laissons icy Pantagruel avecques ses apostoles. Et parlons du roy Anarche et de son armée” (oc 312); “Maintenant retournons au bon Pantagruel; et racontons comment il se porta en cette affaire” (oc 313).

pantagruel

265

as an anti-epic, in which the epic vein gives rise, not merely to word-play as in burlesque, but takes on a veritable philosophical sense: “In the Pantagruel, […] deflation of the epic is motivated by the profoundly anti-imperialist, evangelical ideology that infuses the entire work.”47 The war against the Dipsodes is recounted in a rather abstract way rather than reproduced in actions as will be the case with the Picrocholine war. While Gargantua’s combats take place in a very precise geographical setting around Chinon, Pantagruel’s have a much vaguer setting in Utopian and Dipsodic territories. There are many delayed effects and digressions. It would seem that great armed exploits are not what most interest the narrator nor the characters themselves. While there appears to be some urgency, to the point where Pantagruel “left Paris without saying good-bye to anyone” (cw 209), still, Panurge takes the time to explain “the reason why the leagues are so short in France” (ibid.); Pantagruel’s companions declare themselves solemnly ready to live and die with their lord, and each speaks of his skills (ch. 24).48 The first encounter highlights the subtle ruse of Panurge who proposes to Pantagruel that he “all alone” will defeat 660 knights, but who is aided by Carpalim, Eusthenes, and Epistemon (ch. 25). This exploit accomplished, the companions take such pleasure in eating and exchanging witticisms that they need repeatedly to be reminded of their duty as combatants. The giant puts off the crucial moment by proposing to erect a monument commemorating his friends’ valor (ch. 27). This chapter is constructed in terms of symmetry and reversal as the serious “victory inscription” (cw 219) [“dicton victorial,” oc 308] echoes a parodic rewriting Panurge dedicates to the Hares [“Levraulx”]. Here Panurge plays the role of the king’s buffoon, offering a grotesque counterpoint to the giant’s poetic composition. The comic couple is not fixed in a stereotyped relationship, and Panurge does not take comic functions on himself to leave Pantagruel a contrasting space in which to seem wise. The poetic joust, in the end, turns into a farting contest, Pantagruel’s giving rise to Pygmies (ch. 27). It is not until chapter 28 that we see Pantagruel finally become a war-time leader. Until then, the tale was focused on the ruses and entirely human efforts of Panurge and his fellows, immortalized in the monument as “four stout heroes, resolute and bold” (cw 219) [“quatre preux et vaillans champions” (oc 309)]. Neither do the “deeds and exploits” of the giant have anything truly chivalric about them. Pantagruel invents strategies that allow him to return to his origins, and it is only “very strangely,” as the title of chapter 28 tells us, that he is victorious over the Dipsodes and the Giants. 47 48

Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, 139. Il “partit de Paris sans dire à dieu à nulluy” (oc 298); Panurge prend le temps de raconter “la cause pourquoy les lieues sont tant petites en France” (ibid.).

266

monferran and thomine

Sending him back to his camp, he entrusts a prisoner with a sort of compote with considerable powers of provoking thirst, which did not fail in its effect, the enemy drinking so much that “they fell asleep like pigs, without order, throughout the camp” (cw 223) [“ils s’endormirent comme porcs sans ordre parmy le camp” (oc 313)]. The tactic he decreed was to attack the enemy during the night by fire (Carpalim burns their tents and pavilions) and by salt (placed in sleeping soldiers’ mouths). The “urinary deluge” (cw 225) [“deluge urinal” (oc 315)] which concludes the episode links it to motifs connected to Noah, to fertility, and to the Flood.49 The long-awaited account of the battle finally appears in chapter 29. This is no doubt the chapter where Rabelais’s position on war during those years is most readily apparent. Pantagruel conducts himself as a prince, and as a humanist prince, carefully considering the bellicose actions he is undertaking. He is the opposite of King Anarche, a king entirely incapable of fulfilling his duties, as his name makes clear from the start (anarchia in Greek meaning the absence of a leader). After having unjustifiably invaded Utopia, he leaves his subordinate to fight in his place. This cowardly monarch with his imperialist policies adumbrates the more highly developed Picrochole. Pantagruel, in all ways his opposite, engages in a direct duel with Loupgarou, justifying this action as necessary for the defense of his people. In a traditional prayer before undertaking combat, Pantagruel recalls with rare solemnity and conviction that only defensive wars can be justified and that in no case can they be waged in the name of religion (ch. 29). Rejecting faith imposed by force based on Christ’s words to Peter (Matt 26:52), and thereby any notion of crusade, Pantagruel appears more than ever a disciple of Erasmus, echoing precisely his pacifist tone seen from the Querella Pacis (1518) to the long letter contemporary with Pantagruel addressed to Joannes Rinck, Utilissima consultatio de bello Turcis inferendo (1530), refuting arguments in favor of a war against the Turks, then at the gates of Vienna.50 The Gospel can only be preached, it cannot be imposed by arms or fire. 49

50

Walter E. Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln, NE: 1989); Les géants de Rabelais: Folklore, histoire ancienne, nationalisme, trans. F. Preisig (Paris: 2006). See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: 1968) [L’ œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, trans. A. Robel (Paris: 1970)], on the connection between these motifs and the grotesque body. Bakhtin speaks of a carnivalesque fire that brings renewal to the world. Voir Frédéric Tinguely, “L’alter sensus des turqueries de Panurge,”er 42 (2003): 57–73. And on the prayer in the face of peril and its biblical references, see Michael Screech, Rabelais (London: 1979), 97–101.

pantagruel

267

This serious precept, delivered before the battle soon to take a grotesque turn, nonetheless will be partially challenged when Pantagruel invades the land of the Dipsodes in a conquest undertaken in the name of the need for living space (ch. 31). A contradiction on the part of Pantagruel, the character? Or is Rabelais himself caught between his admiration for Erasmus and his devotion to the king of France and the latter’s imperialist politics? In any case, the author shows us the colonization of the land undertaken with astonishing ease. The inhabitants are happy to see the invaders and, with the exception of the Almyrodes, they all bring Pantagruel the keys to their cities. Does humanist imperialism, the only acceptable kind (?), function by persuasion alone, based on the people’s free will (ch. 32)?

8

Imaginary Travels (ch. 30–33)

Alongside the hostile world facing the protagonists in the episode of the war against the Dipsodes, other universes are also explored at the end of this novel that Mikhail Bakhtin considered “the most cosmic of all Rabelais’s works.”51 The first of these fantasies is a trip to the land of the dead. In the last skirmish, Epistemon lost his head, which gives rise to a funeral chant in honor of the departed hero, another element characteristic of war accounts. The pathetic or even tragic aspects of this scene might have led Pantagruel to the ultimate, not at all Christian, action: “Pantagruel was so woeful that he wanted to kill himself” (cw 230) [“fut si dolent qu’il se voulut tuer soymesmes” (oc 321)]. However, such intentions were immediately undercut by the narrator’s comic tone and positive attitude demonstrated by Panurge as thaumaturge and magician. By his skills, death was ‘cured,’ and the morbid motif quickly changes into a clinical description of the marvel. The appeal of the episode is vastly increased here, as Rabelais so often does, by the play of several intertexts. The traditional moment in an epic where the dead are accounted for after a battle is enriched by sacred motifs: Epistemon holds his head “between his arms, all bloody” (cw 230) [“entre ses bras toute sanglante” (oc 321)], recalling Saint Denis. Echoes of miracles in the Hebrew bible (the resurrection of the son of the Shunammite by Elisha [2Kings 4:18–37]), and the New Testament (Christ’s resurrection of the daughter of Jarius [Mark 5:21–43] and Lazarus [John 11:1–44]) are also superimposed on the reading of this passage. Those familiar with medieval novels might also think of famous resurrections like

51

Bakhtin, L’ œuvre de François Rabelais, 338.

268

monferran and thomine

that of Richard in the geste of the Quatre Fils Aymon. Beyond the novelist’s reticence at killing off his characters, we also see the physician writing here, amusing himself by describing a surgical operation in terms at once clinical (by the use of scientific vocabulary) and miraculous. Death becomes a curable illness thanks to a bit of skill and some white wine which serves both as disinfectant (as it had for the magician Maugis cleaning Richard’s wounds) and stimulant, when accompanied by “a piece of sugared toast” (cw 231) [“roustie sucrée” (oc 322)]. Epistemon’s “big household fart” (cw 231) [in French a pun “pet de mesnage” (oc 322) echoing “pain de mesnage”] is the comic mark of his return to life, like the fart of a bear when he leaves his den in spring. Bakhtin understands this foregrounding of animality as a victory of the lower, corporal element over death, a motif he identifies with popular culture.52 Epistémon’s account of his travels through hell takes up one of the most celebrated of epic themes, but the epic descent into the land of the dead, usually accomplished by the hero, here is delegated to one of his companions, and gives rise to a comic, parodic revision. Lucian’s Menippus seu Necyomantia [Menippus or the Descent into Hades] is the major inspiration here, for example the lowering of the great and the rich, but it is Rabelais who adds the elevation of the poor and the humble, connecting the ancient tradition of the world upside down and that of the Gospel to present a grotesque reversal: “those who haven’t had the pox in this world have it in the other” (cw 233) [“ceulx qui n’ont eu la verolle en ce monde cy, l’ont en l’ aultre” (oc 324)]. The next chapter, a scaled-down continuation of Epistémon’s trip to Hell, again brings a carnivalesque image of the deposition of the conquered king. Panurge, recalling Epistemon’s account, grants Anarche a hell on earth by making him a “good green-sauce hawker” (cw 237) [“bon cryeur de saulce vert” (oc 329)], just like Xerxes who “was hawking mustard” (cw 231) [“crioit la moustarde” (oc 322)]. There is a cosmic expansion at the end of the novel, this time helped by the giant’s body. Leaving behind the account of the war, which, as we have seen, does not interest Alcofrybas much, and following Gargantua’s injunction to his son Pantagruel, the narrator explores “the other world, which is man” (cw 161) [“l’aultre monde, qui est l’homme” (oc 245)]. During the final battle against the Almyrodes, whose outcome remains unknown since the usual eyewitness found a good shelter from which he saw nothing, Alcofrybas spends six months exploring the giant’s mouth where he discovers a “new world,” which

52

Bakhtin, L’ œuvre de François Rabelais, 338.

pantagruel

269

he explores anatomically and geographically (ch. 32). Rabelais brilliantly combines Lucian’s True History, the contemporaneous discovery of the New World, and the folkloric tradition of being swallowed by a Giant.53 It provides a fine lesson in relativism since the New World seen by Alcofrybas strangely resembles the one he has just left.54 There are no exotic flora or fauna; instead of pineapples or parrots there are cabbages and pigeons. The Other is barely distinguishable from us, which means that, far from being idealized, he shares our vices, conflict and vice being equally widespread in his universe. At the end of the episode, Pantagruel awards Alcofrybas the castellany of Salmagundi. The prince rewards his explorer and also his buffoon who had made him laugh at everything and done him good (cw 241; oc 333). Nonetheless, it is not until the last voyage that we understand all the profit to be drawn from the story. With a final pirouette, the novel ends on “a great heap of ordure” (cw 243) [“montjoye d’ordure” (oc 335)], fecal matter and corrupted humors cleared out by “pioneers,” armed with picks, shovels, and buckets. The joyous ordure, which has so considerable a role in this first book, is “well cleaned out” (cw 243) [“bien nettoyé” (oc 335)]. In just the same way, at the end of the Fourth Book, Panurge, having soiled himself, is urged by Pantagruel to put on a clean white shirt (fb, ch. 67). Noting the lantern and the lighted torch carried by one of the explorers, Estienne Pasquier, an attentive reader, saw the mark of Rabelais the “Lucanizing physician […] wanting to teach us under cover of fiction, that with such illnesses physicians progress only by feeling their way.”55 It is certainly Rabelais the physician who ends the first phase of Pantagruel’s adventures with a futuristic therapy calming the giant’s stomach pains. So, the book fulfills the functions it took on and which the expedients suggested in the prologue brought to the fore: to calm the pains of body and soul.

53 54

55

On this episode and its connections to Gargantua’s swallowing the pilgrims, see the chapter by Frank Lestringant in the present collection. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: La représentation de la réalité dans la littérature occidentale, trans. C. Heim (Paris: 1968), chapter 11. Eng. trans. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton: 1968). Rabelais, “médecin lucianisant, […] voulant, sous l’ escorce de ceste fiction, nous apprendre qu’ en telles maladies les medecins n’y besongnent qu’à tastons.” Estienne Pasquier, Lettres familières, ed. D. Thickett (Geneva: 1974), letter xix, 16, A Monsieur Tournebus, Conseiller en la Cour du Parlement de Paris.

270 9

monferran and thomine

Epilogues

Alcofrybass constant presence as both character and narrator in the final episodes announces the end of the novel which takes place in the form of an epilogue of sorts, understood as a short reply to the prologue. Leaving fiction behind, the charlatan Alcofrybas speaks once again directly to his readers, promising the public new, even more astonishing Panurgian and Pantagruelic adventures, available at the next Frankfurt fair. The first, 1532 epilogue is short, serene, confident in fiction’s capacity to do good, in the pleasure of writing and reading “these idiocies and comical tomfooleries” (cw 244) [“ces balivernes et plaisantes mocquettes” (oc 336)]. By 1534, things are different. In the novel’s second edition, Rabelais adds to this first ending a full page in a quite different tone. The addition is a long, violent invective against hypocrites, false piety, and more specifically, bad readers of Pantagruelic books, who reject the merry pastime they might have had and, instead, dig through excrement and “look out through a hole” (cw 245) [“regarder par un partuys” (oc 337)] in an inadequate, not to say perverse, fashion. On the other hand, good readers are invited to be “good Pantagruelists (that is to say to live in peace, joy, and health, always having a good time)” (cw 245).56 This uneasy farewell, in the form of Alcofrybas’s reply, is the echo of Pantagruel’s early reception. While it was well received by the public, as the seven surviving editions before 1534 attest, it had little effect among the learned, unnerved by its obscenity and its crudeness, and even before it was formally condemned by the Sorbonne, it could hardly have pleased the theologians of the Paris Faculty.57 Given the tense political atmosphere in the kingdom, the final invective must be addressed to them, echoing another addition in the 1534 edition which extends the list of Sophists to include “Sorbillans, Sorbonagres, Sorbonigenes, Sorbonicoles, Sorboniformes, Sorbonisecques, Niborcisans, Borsonisans, Saniborsans” (oc 285, var. f, note 6, p. 1307; cw 197, var. note 5, p. 833). Against the assault of detractors and censors openly defied here, Gargantua was to reply by multiplying the images of a solid community of Pantagruelists and Thelemites not yet present among the acolytes of Pantagruel. 56 57

“[B]ons pantagruelistes (c’ est à dire vivre en paix, joye, santé, faisans tousjours grande chere)” (oc 337). See, in addition to the declaration (to be treated with caution) of Nicolas Bourbon, Nugae (1533), ed. S. Laigneau (Geneva: 2008), “In Rabellum,” 701 and the circumspect note 1345, Calvin’s remarks in a 1553 letter to François Daniel, which tells of a member of the Sorbonne, Nicolas Le Clerc, who declares that he included Pantagruel, which he considered obscene, in a list of pernicious books. Marcel de Grève, L’interprétation de Rabelais au xvie siècle, (er) 3 (Geneva: 1961), 16.

pantagruel

10

271

In Conclusion

Pantagruel is often considered a first try, an awkward draft of Gargantua, less clear in its aims. It is certainly possible to explain its more cobbled-together nature in another way, and to understand that in writing this irreverent text, Rabelais sought to provide everything except, as Thaumaste would put it, “a great book, […], in which he declares everything without omitting a thing” (cw 202) or, like Panurge, the author of the Convenience of Long Codpieces, “a fine big book” (cw 186).58 Intentionally, in the spirit of humanist wit as practiced by the Italians (think of Poggio’s Confabulationes) or Erasmus in his Praise of Folly, this tale seems a bit scrawny and disorganized, constantly mixing comic and serious elements, thumbing its nose at well-established certitudes. Rabelais’s parodies destabilize readers, inviting them to question the sense and the meaning of words and episodes. He also presents problems of comprehension, exposing his characters to perplexities and risks of interpretation, from the episode of the Limousin student to those of Baisecul and Humevesne or of Pantagruel’s lady sending him a sheet of paper without a visible message, resisting all means of interpretation (ch. 24). It falls to the readers to turn the pages of this little book full of verve and to look less for the proverbial bone marrow than to find an invitation to enjoy laughter, wit, and a funny story that demand to be deciphered. Readers should concentrate more on Pantagruel and Panurge’s polyphonic interplay than on Pantagruel’s novel. By doing so, one may hear an echo of God’s laughter, as Milan Kundera suggests: “There is a wonderful Jewish proverb: Man thinks, God laughs. In the spirit of that sentence, I like to think that François Rabelais heard God’s laughter one day, and that this is how the idea for the first great European novel was born.”59 Translated by Marian Rothstein 58 59

“[U]n grand livre, […], auquel il declaire tout sans rien laisser” (oc 291); “beau et grand livre” (oc 272). “Il y a un proverbe juif admirable: L’ homme pense, Dieu rit. Inspiré par cette sentence, j’ aime imaginer que François Rabelais a entendu un jour le rire de Dieu et que c’est ainsi que l’ idée du premier grand roman européen est née.” Kundera, L’art du roman (Paris: 1986), 191.

chapter 11

The Prequel Gargantua: An Original Reworking of Pantagruel Nicolas Le Cadet

1

History of the Text

Doctor of medicine at Lyon’s Hôtel-Dieu from the 1 November 1532, protégé of Jean Du Bellay (bishop and soon-to-be [May 1535] cardinal of Paris), with whom he first stayed in Rome from February to April of 1534, corrector and editor of texts for the Lyonnais printers Sébastien Gryphe and François Juste, Rabelais nonetheless never abandoned his fictional work. In either 1534 or at the beginning of 1535, he published Gargantua, the story of Pantagruel’s father. The only known copy of the first edition, attributed to François Juste, who had already published Pantagruel in 1533 and 1534, is in fact missing its original title page, making it difficult to date with any precision. However, it is not without importance for interpreting the text to know when it was written and whether it appeared before or after the Affair of the Placards (occurring on the night of the 17 October 1534), which gave rise to a violent climate of repression in France. Whatever the case may be, a second edition, containing numerous changes, was published by François Juste in 1535. Below Rabelais’s Greek motto (αγαθη τυχη, “Good Fortune”), its title page reads: La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel, jadis composée par L’abstracteur de quinte essence. Livre plein de pantagruelisme (The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel, Composed of old by the Abstractor of Quintessence. A Book Full of Pantagruelism). Just like Pantagruel, the book was reprinted by Juste in 1537, with no modification, and then again in 1542 with several changes and a new title: La vie treshorrificque du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel jadis composee par M. Alcofribas abstracteur de quinte essence. Livre plein de Pantagruelisme (The Very Horrific Life of the Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel, Composed of old by Master Alcofribas, Abstractor of Quintessence. A Book Full of Pantagruelism). All the Juste editions employ the Gothic typesetting, which may have been a kind of “typographic humor.” Indeed, Stephen Rawles is of the opinion that the Gothic typography confers an ironic and willfully anachronistic dimension to Rabelais’s text, all the more so in 1542, at a time when Roman type was the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_013

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

273

established norm for prose.1 The 1542 Juste editions of Pantagruel and Gargantua are thought to be the last editions Rabelais himself approved.2 They were revised from the unauthorized editions of Pantagruel and Gargantua produced in 1537 by Denis de Harsy, and reproduce these editions’ much increased spacing of layout, numerous indents, and vertical disposition of several lists (such as the list of 217 games in the case of Gargantua).

2

The Liminary dizain and the Author’s Prologue

The second-born of Rabelais’s Livres, Gargantua, is nevertheless placed first in any complete works (a practice begun during the author’s life), privileging the generational over the compositional order.3 Modern editors do not stray from this editorial tradition, meaning that Gargantua’s liminary dizain “Aux lecteurs” (“To the Readers”) and its prologue now retain strategic pride of place in his work. The last two lines of the dizain hold up the importance of laughter, recalling a phrase of scholastic origin, Risus proprium hominis: “Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escripre. / Pource que rire est le propre de l’ homme” (“Better a laugh to write of than a tear / For it is laughter that becomes man best”). Rabelais sets himself in opposition to theologians of penitence and bases his writing on laughter. Alongside homo sapiens, Rabelais—just as Johan Huizinga later would—sees the homo ludens, endowed with a wonderful propensity for playfulness. However, the “Author’s Prologue” in fact gives two arguments which call for mere laughter to be transcended (oc 5–8; cw 3–5). First, it is a book whose very title and even content appear, just like Socrates the Silenus, to be foolish, yet conceal precious teachings when read “[à] plus hault sens” (“in a higher sense”), i.e., allegorically. The reader should not rest at the literal meaning, as appealing as it may be, for danger of running aground like the sailors seduced by “[le] chant des Sirenes” (“the Sirens’ song”). Like the drinker who swipes a bottle, or the dog sucking on a bone, hoping to find a little marrow, the reader must seek out the “tres haultz sacremens et mysteres horrificques” (“very lofty 1 Stephen Rawles, “What Did Rabelais Really Know about Printing and Publishing?,” in Éditer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges, ed. P.J. Smith (Amsterdam-Atlanta: 1997), 9–34 (see especially 13–16). 2 These are the editions chosen by Mireille Huchon for the Pléiade edition, Œuvres complètes (Paris: 1994). Gérard Defaux, in the Pochothèque edition (1994), opted instead for the 1534 Juste edition of Pantagruel and the 1535 Juste edition of Gargantua. 3 Pierre de Tours, the Lyonnais printer, first established this tradition in 1542 when he brought together the first two books: Grands Annales tresveritables des Gestes merveilleux du grand Gargantua et Pantagruel son filz, Roy des Dipsodes [nrb 25].

274

le cadet

sacraments and horrific mysteries”) hidden within the book. “The Author” then produces a second argument, expressed by means of a sometimes complex syntax.4 He presents his text as a Bacchic book, composed not laboriously, by the light of an oil lamp (as Demosthenes wrote), but under the merry inspiration of Bacchus (just as Homer and Ennius were). Consequently, it holds “haultes matieres et sciences profundes” (“lofty matters and […] profound knowledge”), even though these may not have been inserted mindfully, similarly to Homer who did not think about the allegories that can nevertheless be found in his writings. This is why, distinguishing themselves from Tirelupin (“one no-good”), who insults the Author’s books because they smell more like wine than oil, the benevolent readers must interpret these “belles billes vezées” (“fine idiocies”) in the most perfect sense. Nonetheless, several critics, partisans of a pluralist and ambiguous Rabelais, point out the limits of this Silenic reading which consists of opening the fictional box and then discovering “une celeste et impreciable drogue” (“a heavenly drug beyond price”).5 They make a particular case of the fact that the Prologue’s enunciative device somewhat undermines the call for its allegorical sense to be sought out. Indeed, the words are not Rabelais’s (whose name appeared only in the royal privilege dated 19 September 1545, and then on the title page of the 1546 Tiers Livre). Rather, they are the words of his “masque comique” (“comic mask”),6 the facetious “M. Alcofribas,”7 whose rude interjections to boozing readers, which open and close the prologue, recall in no small measure the drunken Alcibiades from the end of Plato’s Symposium. Moreover, such critics declare that the second half of the prologue, where Alcofribas explains that, no more than Homer before him, he had not thought up the allegories to be found in this text written while “beuvant et mangeant” (“eating and

4 Edwin Duval provides a most enlightening syntactic clarification in “Interpretation and the ‘Doctrine absconse’ of Rabelais’s prologue to Gargantua,” (er) 18 (1985): 1–17. 5 For an evaluation of these interpretations of the Prologue to Gargantua, opposing the partisans of ambiguity (Leo Spitzer, Floyd Gray, François Rigolot, Terence Cave, Michel Jeanneret, Jean Lafond, Jerome Schwartz) and the partisans of transparency (of thought, of intention, of the author himself) (Michael Screech, Duval, Defaux), I refer the reader to my own study L’ Evangélisme fictionnel: Les Livres rabelaisiens, le Cymbalum Mundi, L’Heptaméron (1532– 1552) (Paris: 2010), 56–63. 6 The expression is due to Defaux, nevertheless a partisan of transparency: “Rabelais et son masque comique: Sophista loquitur,” er 11 (1974): 89–135; reprinted in Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophète. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua et Le Quart Livre, (er) 32 (Geneva: 1997), 407–453. 7 The putative author’s name was only printed on the title page of Gargantua from the 1542 Juste edition onward.

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

275

drinking”), renders any unequivocally allegorical reading impossible. On top of this, Rabelais seems to de-emphasize the allegorical operation, as suggested by two details in the text: first, the shift in the 1542 edition from allegories for sifting (“beluter”) to allegories for caulking (“calfreter”—to plug the holes in a ship with oakum), clearly a more pejorative verb; and, secondly, the negatively cast figure of “frere Lubin” (“Friar Booby”), who sees allusions to the Gospels where there are none. In this way, the prologue to Gargantua crystallizes the tensions which animate Rabelaisian criticism concerning the status of fiction, seen by some as simply the medium for an unequivocal and transparent allegorical reading, by others as proof of a pluralist, polysemic, ambiguous, and abstruse hermeneutics. Bookending the main text are, first, the “Fanfreluches antidotées” (“Antidoted Frigglefraggles”), composed of fourteen huitains overflowing with obscure allusions to events of the time (G, ii), and then, at the end, the “Enigme en prophetie” (“A Prophetic Riddle”), a representation, so says Gargantua, of “gens reduictz à la creance evangelique” (“people brought back to the Evangelicalist belief”), but which, according to Frère Jean, is a “description du Jeu de Paulme” (“description of the game of tennis”) (G, lviii); two riddles, both of which incarnate and display the difficulties inherent to any hermeneutic enterprise.

3

The Similarities between Pantagruel and Gargantua

Gargantua takes much inspiration from the Grandes et inestimables cronicques de l’enorme geant Gargantua (The Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Enormous Giant Gargantua) (1532), a runaway best seller over which Alcofribas rhapsodizes in the prologue to Pantagruel.8 From this opuscule, Rabelais takes the names of the hero Gargantua and his parents Grant Gosier and Galemelle (from the Languedocien galimello, “someone tall and thin”), transforming the latter two into Grandgousier and Gargamelle (from the Languedocien gargamello, “throat”). Also found in this prior work are the episodes relating the tailoring of his livery (G, viii), the great mare who knocks down every last tree in the forest as it kills flies with its tail (G, xvi), the bells of Notre-Dame, which

8 Huchon, oc, 1171–1183, believes Rabelais to be its editor, perhaps even its author, and that he provided it with a table of contents in his own style. Gargantua also took inspiration from Le Vroy Gargantua, most likely published in 1533, which adds several episodes to the Grandes Croniques. The opuscule displays stylistic elements close to Rabelais’s (numerical exaggeration, erotic metaphors, etc.), and also similar preoccupations (a penchant for contemporary allusions, an “Institution du Prince”).

276

le cadet

Gargantua carries off to hang around his mare’s neck (G, xvii), as well as the episode containing the idea of the giant’s hollow tooth9 (G, xxxviii). Nonetheless Rabelais removed all reference to Brittany, Merlin, and King Arthur, central in these earlier versions. But if one is to speak of a reworking, it is also of Pantagruel, the author’s first opus. The full title of Gargantua even insists upon this link, since it refers to the eponymous giant as the “pere de Pantagruel,” and Rabelais even specifies that the book is “plein de pantagruelisme.” By inventing his own prequel to Pantagruel, Rabelais manages to present his fiction as a coherent cycle, emancipated from the filiation of The Great Chronicles. 3.1 Parodying Chivalric Romance First of all, Rabelais re-establishes the parody of chivalric romance style which had characterized Pantagruel. He once again adopts the narrative structure covering the hero’s birth, his infancy (life before knighthood),10 his great feats of arms against an imperialist king, and, in the present case, even the founding of a monastery, Theleme (just as Girart de Roussillon [Paris, Michel Le Noir, 1520] ends on the founding of the Vézelay monastery). He also takes back up the idea of the four companions who travel with the hero, and whose characters are arranged around the distinction between the virtues of the body and those of the spirit.11 Hence, the four “Apostles” united around Pantagruel in the war against the Dipsodes—Panurge, Epistemon the “pedagogue,” the sturdy Eusthènes, and the swift Carpalim (P, xxviii)—are replaced by: Eudémon (from the Greek εύδαίμων, “well fortuned”), the model of the eloquent young pupil (retrospectively reintroduced in chapter ix of the 1542 Pantagruel); Ponocrates (from πόνος, “labour” and κράτος, “force”), first preceptor to Eudémon, then to Gargantua and to the vanquished tyrant Picrochole’s son; the equestrian, Gymnaste (from the Greek γυμναστής, “master of gymnastics”), who teaches the giant “the art of chivalry” and who proves himself capable of great physical exploits; and, finally, Frère Jean des Entommeures, whose name alludes both to his fighting spirit and his taste for all things culinary.

9 10 11

For more details on this question, see Nicolas Le Cadet and Adeline Desbois-Ientile, Gargantua, (Paris: 2017), “La réécriture des Chroniques gargantuines,” p. 57–74. On the threefold system of organization in Gargantua, see Nicolas Le Cadet, “Rabelais architecte comique: la structure de Gargantua,” L’Année rabelaisienne, 3, 2019, 133–151. Jean Lecointe, “Les quatre apostoles: Échos de la poétique érasmienne chez Rabelais et Dürer,” rhlf 6 (November–December 1995): 888–905.

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

277

In addition, just as Pantagruel was punctuated by four pseudo-epic victories (P, xxv, xxviii, xxix, and xxxii–xxxiii), so “the chivalry Gargantua” abounds in group battles (G, xxxxviii) as well as the most comical of individual exploits. So, for example, Frère Jean des Entommeures, armed with the staff of a crucifix (the vertical section holding the image of the crucified Christ) and a magical monk’s frock, manages to single-handedly vanquish all 13,622 of Picrochole’s soldiers who came to pillage the abbey vineyard at Seuillé (G, xxvii), before inflicting a similar punishment on captain Tiravant and his 1600 knights (G, xliii). In a similar vein, Gymnaste makes the most of a wonderfully superstitious misunderstanding of the expression “poor devil” to massacre captain Tripet and his men (G, xxxv). Last but not least, Gargantua razes the Château of the Fort of Vède to the ground using a great tall tree he uproots with ease (G, xxxvi). These heroic massacres clearly have a parodic side to them.12 The profusion of numerical hyperbole, the mechanical sequencing of the blows meted out, the anatomical precision, all tend to distort the conventions of the epic form. The goal of this parodic deformation is first and foremost to provoke laughter, and it is not without consequence that the comic figure of Frère Jean appears at the precise moment when Gargantua is maturing in Paris under the thorough tutelage of Ponocrates (G, xvi–xxxiii). But for Jean Céard, Rabelais, in Pantagruel and Gargantua, is embodying both the “reader” and the “judge” of chivalric romance.13 He does not make do with some merely burlesque skit, such as Folengo’s Baldus, Pulci’s Morgante, or Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. He lashes out at the vision of war communicated in such novels, at the very notion of “exploits” (G, xlvi), and at the definition of man that they hold up, based not on improvement through education, but on bloodlines and heroic deeds. This is also the view held by both Guy Demerson and Patricia Eichel-Lojkine, for whom Frère Jean embodies two vices belonging to the very spirit of the epic: presumptuousness, since he trusts more in his own might than in the effectiveness of prayer or divine service (G, xxvii); and cruelty, insofar as he ruthlessly kills his enemies, despite both their cries for mercy and Gargantua’s appeals for moderation (G, xxvii, xliiii, xxxxiii).14 Let us not forget, how12 13

14

Emile Besch, “Les adaptations en prose des chansons de geste,” rss 3 (1915): 155–181. Jean Céard, “L’Histoire écoutée aux portes de la légende: Rabelais, les fables de Turpin et les exemples de saint Nicolas,” in Études seiziémistes offertes à Monsieur le Professeur V.L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1980), 91–109; Id., “Rabelais et la matière épique,” in La Chanson de geste et le mythe carolingien. Mélanges René Louis (Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay: 1982), 1259– 1276; Id., “Rabelais, lecteur et juge des romans de chevalerie,” in Rabelais en son demimillénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 237–248. Guy Demerson, “Paradigmes épiques chez Rabelais,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire,

278

le cadet

ever, that for Mikhail Bakhtin, these scenes of “carnivalesque dissection” are as ambivalent as they are playful: for him, the aim of such scenes is to topple the representatives of bygone power and truth, thereby bearing forth a new, revitalized world.15 Frère Jean would represent the instrument of this revival: in the abbey vineyard at Seuillé the blood turns into wine, into a fertile harvest. Similarly, for Michael Screech and Florence Weinberg, the cruelty, perhaps inextricably linked to all comedy, operates in a dehumanized world, so much so that the reader feels no pity for Picrochole’s soldiers whatsoever. Frère Jean is seen as a “parable” figure: he stands against the enemies of the true faith, against blind obedience to human norms, defending the vine, the very essence of Christianity.16 3.2 Comedy of Giants and Banquets Rabelais also renews the comedy of giants of his previous book, through the themes of boundless appetite (P, iv and G, vii), deluges of urine (P, xxviii and G, xvii), the swallowing of people (P, xxxii and G, xxxviii),17 and also by playing with relative size: the bells of Notre-Dame are fit to be hung like cowbells around the neck of Gargantua’s mare (G, xvii), and Grandgousier presumes the cannonballs Gargantua pulls from his hair to be but lice (G, xxxvii). Likewise, Gargantua is once again a tale punctuated by very merry and well lubricated feasts. Grandgousier, “bon raillard en son temps, aymant à boyre net” (“a great joker in his time, loving to drink hearty”) (G, iii), is most often the orchestrator of these repasts. First of all, there is the feast that gathers together the inhabitants of the neighboring villages—the soon-to-be-named “bienyvres” (“potted”)—during which Gargamelle gives birth to Gargantua (G, iv–vi), then the feast celebrating Gargantua’s return to his father’s château, to which Frère Jean is called, in honor of his victorious defense of the abbey close at Seuillé (G, xxxvii–xl), and, of course, the feast to end all feasts, celebrating the Gargantuists’ final victory over Picrochole (G, li). Wine is clearly for Rabelais a sign of joy, life, and conviviality, but it also appears in Gargantua as the symbol of writing and its inexhaustible fecundity: the book is like a bottle

15 16

17

225–236; Patricia Eichel-Lojkine, Excentricité et humanisme: Parodie, dérision et détournement des codes à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2002), 179–200. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: 1968). Michael Screech, Rabelais (London: 1979); Florence Weinberg, “Frère Jean, Évangélique: Sa fonction dans le monde rabelaisien,” in Rabelais et les leçons du rire: Paraboles évangéliques et néoplatoniciennes (Orléans: 2000), 63–77. Frank Lestringant, “Dans la bouche des géants (Pantagruel, 32; Gargantua, 38),” Cahiers Textuel 4/5 (1989): 43–52.

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

279

offered by the narrator-sommelier to his readers-drinkers and “Pantagruelizing” means “drinking your fill and reading the horrific deeds of Pantagruel” (G, i, 10; cw 8). 3.3 Realia and the Supernatural Again, just as in Pantagruel, Rabelais makes sure to intermingle realia with the supernatural. As Abel Lefranc has shown, Gargantua makes reference to several individuals linked with Rabelais’s childhood: Frogier, the shepherd, bears a name that is common in the Chinonais (G, xxv), the lawyer Jean Gallet is hinted at behind the figure of Ulrich Gallet (G, xxx) and, above all, “Picrochole, tiers de ce nom” (“Picrochole, third of that name”), king of Lerné (G, xxvi), inescapably recalls Gaucher de Sainte-Marthe (lord of Lerné and personal physician to the Abbess of Fontevrault), with whom Rabelais’s father was embroiled in a lawsuit. He was husband to Marie Marquet, who bears the same surname as the “grand bastonnier de la confrairie des fouaciers” (“chief standard-bearer of the confraternity of fouaciers”) who attacks Frogier. Furthermore, the action is no longer staged in the kingdom of Utopia, but in the Chinonais: the “bienyvres” are “citadins de Sainnais, de Suillé: de la Rocheclermaud, de Vaugaudray, sans laisser arriere le Coudray, Montpensier, le Gué de Vede et aultres voisins” (“burghers of Sinay, Seuillé, La Roche Clermauld, and Vaugaudry, without omitting le Coudray Montpensier, the Ford of Vède, and other neighbors”) (G, iv, 17; cw 14). The “dix et sept mille neuf cens treze vaches” (“seventeen thousand nine hundred and thirteen cows”) who give Gargantua his milk, come “from Pontille and Bréhémont” (G, vii, 23; cw 21). The entire Picrocholine war, punctuated by violent clashes at Seuillé, La Roche Clermauld, and the Ford of Vède, is centered around La Devinière, the Rabelais family residence. The 31 cities confederated as Grandgousier’s four strongholds also are all in the Chinonais (G, xlvii). Likewise, the giant’s stay in Paris (G, xvi–xxxiv) includes several real-world details: the towers of Notre-Dame, the Sorbonne, replaced by the Hôtel de Nesle in the 1542 edition (G, xvii), the Saint-Victor Gate and Montmartre (G, xxiii), the escapades in the nearby villages of Gentilly, Boulognesur-Seine, Montrouge, Pont-de-Charenton, Vanves, and Saint-Cloud (G, xxiv). Ponocrates even alludes to the “colliege de pouillerie qu’ on nomme Montagu” (“louse-ridden school they call Montagu”) (G, xxxvii, 102; cw 86). However, the exaggerated numbers of aggressors, the imaginary peoples and places,18 as well as the farcical or erudite surnames, all establish distance to

18

Some examples: Gargamelle is the “fille du roy des Parpaillos” (G, iii); don Philippe des Marays “Viceroy de Papeligosse” (G, xv); and Alpharbal “roy de Canarre” (G, l).

280

le cadet

these realia. Indeed, Rabelais, using both derivation and composition, devises several French or dialectical names which indicate either the lascivious nature of a character (“Janotus de Bragmardo” G, xvii; “Jousse Bandouille” G, xx) or else their idiocy, as with the “Ducs de Tournemoule, de Basdefesses, et de Menuail, ensemble le prince de Gratelles, et le vicomte de Morpiaille” (“Dukes Turnmill, Droopytail, and Smallfry, also Prince Bugscratcher, and Viscount Guzzler”) (G, xxxi, 88; cw 75). For the Gargantuists, captains, or pages brought to life in the Picrocholine war, he borrows transparent names from Greek: Acamas the tireless, Phrontiste the prudent, Tolmere the brave. This is why, according to Gabriel Spillebout, the “réalisme chinonais” is staged outside of reality, it is the “support réel d’une para-réalité” (“a reality [supporting] a parareality”) as well as becoming a “surreality” through the supernatural elements.19 This is also Gérard Defaux’s point of view, who sees Gargantua as obeying the demands of art more than those of reality and historical accuracy, though with the caveat that this observation must not lead the reader to a denial of the very real presence within the fiction of Rabelais’s actual world and person.20 3.4 Ironic Protestations of Veracity Lastly, Gargantua also resembles Pantagruel in its use of ironic protestations of veracity, formulated by a sophist narrator who is no longer involved as a character in the story as in chapters xvii and xxxii of the first opus, but whose presence “devient proprement envahissante” (“becomes genuinely intrusive”), especially during the first ten chapters.21 All the while recounting pure nonsense, Alcofribas invokes the authority of the “anciens Pantagruelistes” (“old Pantagruelists”) (G, iii), implores the reader to believe his word regarding the bizarre birth of Gargantua through the left ear of his mother (G, vi), ducks behind the testimony of a nurse to the infant Gargantua (G, vii), refers the reader to his work entitled De la dignité des braguettes (On the dignity of codpieces) (G, viii), takes the airs of excusing himself for his digressions by comparing himself to an errant ship returning to its home port (G, ix) and lowering its sails (G, x), and then also claims credibility for his story by referring to the Supplementum Supplementi chronicorum (1503) by Jacques-Philippe Foresti when he explains that Gargamelle died of sheer joy at Gargantua’s return to the family château (G, xxxvii). Through all of these ironic protestations of veracity, stan-

19 20 21

Gabriel Spillebout, “Le réalisme chinonais,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire, 69–75. Defaux, “Rabelais’s realism, again,” er 29 (1993): 25–41. Defaux, “Rabelais et son masque comique,” 95.

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

281

dard fare in the various Chroniques gargantuines of the era,22 Rabelais states his position in the contemporary debates around historiography by showing how three very common narrative styles critically obscure the boundaries that separate history from legend: both chronicles and hagiography are steeped in fictitious romance, whereas chivalric romance claims to be factual.23 At the same time, the process also allows him to underline the fictional nature of his own tale. This is the double-edged lesson of historiography and poetry that Rabelais drew from Lucian of Samosata: in the latter’s treatise How to Write History, he undertakes to satirize the historiography of his time, and in his True Stories, he imagines a fantastical travel tale which makes no attempt to hide its fiction. Whereas the historian is obliged to stick to the facts and prove his truthfulness in every point, the poet is instead free to express the charms of fantasy, without having to concern himself with accuracy.24 This is precisely what the narrator of the True Stories announces before the voyage begins: “I will likely be telling the truth when saying this one thing, namely that I am lying.”25 This is exactly what the subsequent ironic protestations of veracity remind us of, throughout the text, and which can be seen as the “true stories” topos, in reference to the work’s antiphrastic title. Rabelais, however, concludes much broader implications from the process, which he employs to engage with the question of writer authority and its relation to the reader. The “true stories” topos now takes on a meta-literary role: to draw out a discerning reader, immune to the lure of fictitious illusions.26

4

An Amplified and Less Graphic Reworking

Although there are several echoes between Rabelais’s first two books, the reworking of Pantagruel includes a great many transformations. Not only is the narration extended, with shorter but far more numerous chapters, rising from 34 (P, ed. Juste 1542) to 58 (G, ed. Juste 1542), it is also found to be much more mature. The obscenity, which in Pantagruel was largely exposed through the 22 23 24

25 26

Diane Desrosiers, “Les Chroniques gargantuines et la parodie du chevaleresque,” Études françaises 32.1 (1996): 85–95. See the articles by Céard cited above. On the combination of Lucian’s theoretical and fantastical texts in Pantagruel, see Huchon, oc, 1214–1217, and also Romain Menini, Rabelais altérateur: “Græciser en François” (Paris: 2014), 213–297. Lucian, True Stories, § 4. Nicolas Le Cadet, “Le topos lucianesque des ‘histoires vraies’ et la poétique du Quart Livre,” rhr 74 (June 2012): 7–24.

282

le cadet

character of Panurge, center stage during chapters xiv to xxii, now makes itself more discrete. Certainly, there is still no lack of scatological references in the first chapters, exemplified by the episode where, at age five, young Gargantua, finding himself in what modern psychoanalysis would call the “anal-sadistic stage,”27 reveals his “esperit merveilleux” (“marvelous mind”) by successively testing 58 “textiles (23), plants (17), birds (5), animals (2), as well as other unclassifiables: hay, straw, rushes, litter, a basket, a pouch, lure, and paper,”28 all in order to discover which makes for the best ass-wipe (G, xiii). Frère Jean’s character, playing the part of the comic sidekick, is also fleshed out with richly bawdy banter. But the jolly, cunning companion to Pantagruel, who created a genuine Panurgophobia in certain readers, is no longer on hand to teach “une manière bien nouvelle de bastir les murailles de Paris” (“a very new way of building the walls of Paris”) (P, xv) or play a trick on a “dame Parisianne qui ne fut poinct à son adventage” (“Parisian lady that was not at all to her advantage”) (P, xxii). Rabelais also sets aside the thirst humor which was so essential a part of Pantagruel’s character. Conversely, there is an increase of “serious” passages, such as the educational program implemented by Ponocrates (G, xxiii–xxiv), the speech addressed to the vanquished (G, l), or the description of the abbey of Theleme (G, lii–lviii). It is as if Rabelais, perhaps dismayed with the reception of Pantagruel,29 rethought his objectives in a clearer and more detailed fashion, which can undoubtedly also explain the text’s success in the modern college classroom. 4.1 The Birth and Childhood of the Giant Whereas Badebec, Gargantua’s wife, dies during childbirth as early as chapter ii in Pantagruel, Rabelais takes his time over Gargamelle’s eleven month pregnancy (G, iii), the dietary excesses that trigger the birth30 (G, iv), and the throes

27 28 29

30

Françoise Charpentier, “Une éducation de Prince: Gargantua, chapitre xi,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire, 103–108. Barbara Bowen, “Rabelais et le propos torcheculatif,” in Poétique et narration: Mélanges offerts à Guy Demerson, eds. F. Marotin and J.-P. Saint-Gérand (Paris: 1993), 371–380. Pantagruel is described as “obscène” by Nicolas le Clerc, doctor of the Sorbonne and a cleric of Saint André des Arts. He condemned the book, along with two other texts of the time, which we know from a letter of Calvin’s dated October 1533. The same year, the poet Nicolas Bourbon, in his epigram In Rabellum, expressed consternation that Rabelais would have pupils waste their rich youth “in base vulgarities, in manure, in muck” (“foeda in barbarie, in fimo inque coeno”, Nugae, Paris, Vascosan, 1533, f. 71 v). Gargantua is born on 3 February, Saint Blaise’s day, the saint of breathing and farting, and the protector of sore throats. See Claude Gaignebet, À plus hault sens: L’ésotérisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, vol. 1 (Paris: 1986), 14.

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

283

of an unearthly delivery (the baby Gargantua enters the world through her left ear) (G, vi). Rabelais uses the giantess in order to enact certain current legal, medical, and religious debates: the maximum length of pregnancies (G, iii), the health of the pregnant woman (G, iv), the role of midwives, birth canals, the nature of faith (G, vi), and wet-nursing (G, vii). Likewise, the childhood of the giant, related in just one chapter (iv) in Pantagruel, now takes up seven (G, vii–xiii). Chapter xi, humorously entitled “De l’ adolescence de Gargantua” (“Of the childhood of Gargantua”), describes the giant’s early years, “depuis les troys jusques à cinq ans” (“from the age of three to five years”), spent merrily but without discipline, in the company of animals and nurses, answering only to his basest and most lustful instincts, in opposition to all common mores. Erasmus, proudly prudish, gives strict recommendation not to neglect the education of infants by allowing them free rein, apart from whatever scant guidance may come from mothers, nurses, and servants. Rabelais may well have been inspired by this lesson, deciding from it to indicate Grandgousier’s fault of upbringing in opting for just such a non-education. And yet, Gargantua’s verbal proficiency, the inventiveness he manifests in the episode with the hobbyhorses (G, xii), not to mention that of the best ass-wipe (G, xiii), tend, on the contrary, to underline the giant’s advanced reflective and poetic faculties and, thereby, to attribute a positive value to his childhood years. 4.2 The Education of the Giant Gargantua then provides a more precise definition than Pantagruel of the essence of the new humanist-inspired education. Here, Rabelais joins the movement of educational treatises which had begun to abound in the first half of the 16th century: L’Institution du Prince by Guillaume Budé (manuscript version, 1519), De disciplinis (1531) by the Spaniard Jean-Louis Vivès, and, above all, Erasmus’s opuscules: De ratione studii ac legendi interpretandi auctores (1512), De Institutione principis christiani (1515), Declamatio de pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis (1529), and De civilitate morum puerilium (1530).31 Rabelais, however, brings an original touch to these contemporary ideas about liberal education (that is, an education rooted in the child’s free choice and not in the violent imposition of dogmas) by choosing to embody his thought in princely giants, heirs to a long line of cruel and fratricidal giants (P, i), and described as being real brats in their childhood.32 31 32

Weinberg, “Rabelais et Érasme: Leurs idées sur la pédagogie et sur la guerre,” in Rabelais et les leçons du rire, 43–62. Francis Goyet, “D’ Hercule à Pantagruel: L’ ambivalence des géants,” in Rabelais pour le xxie siècle. Actes du Colloque du Centre d’Etudes supérieures de la Renaissance, Chinon-Tours, 1994, ed. M. Simonin (er) 33 (Geneva: 1998), 177–190.

284

le cadet

Compared to Pantagruel, Gargantua develops the opposition between the medieval education (P, v–vii) and the humanist one (P, viii) more explicitly. It does this via a double sequence of chapters conceived so as to form two sets of antitheses (G, xiv vs G, xv; and G, xxi–xxii vs G, xxiii–xxiv). Convinced that his son “parviendra à degré souverain de sapience, s’ il est bien institué” (“[will] attain the supreme summit of wisdom, if he is well taught”), Grandgousier first turns to the services of the sophists Thubal Holoferne and then Jobelin Bridé.33 This first education, which Rabelais places right at the heart of the middle ages, before the invention of the printing press (Thubal Holoferne died in 1420), is identifiable by its slow pace (more than 53 years when one adds up all the time indications in the text), its inanity (recitals are by heart, and backwards), and its onerousness (suggested symbolically by the enormous writing case the student must carry and the medieval volumes he must passively listen to) (G, xiv). Seeing the harm being done to his son, Grandgousier dismisses Jobelin Bridé: Gargantua promptly leaves for Paris on his African mare, accompanied by his new instructor Ponocrates and the latter’s gifted student Eudemon (G, xv). Thus, just as in Pantagruel, the capital is used as the pivotal point between the two educations. The opposition found between chapters xiv and xv is then revisited and expanded upon in a sequence of four chapters, despite the fact that the sophist tutors have already been dispensed with. Ponocrates’s wish is to begin by inventorying all the bad habits that his student has developed under their instruction, before asking the doctor Théodore (who, in 1535, replaces “Seraphin Calobarsy,” an anagram of “Phrancoys Rabelais”) to “nettoy[er] toute l’ alteration et perverse habitude du cerveau” (“[scour] out all the alteration and perverse habit of his brain”) using hellebore, the traditional cure for madness (G, xxiii, 64; cw 55). This time, the two pedagogies are presented in the form of a “diete,” a description of the day’s schedule, from waking to bedtime. Where a day spent with the sophists had involved static repetition, absence of boundaries, laziness, dirtiness, drunkenness, and gluttony (G, xxi–xxii), the day as conducted by Ponocrates is an affair of desirous repetition, hyperorganisation, hyperactivity, healthy lifestyle, and moderation with drink and food (G, xxiii–xxiv).

33

Using a transparent onomastic play on words, Rabelais stigmatizes the sophist tutors’ obscurantism. “Jobelin” refers to an idiot in old French, confirmed by the term “bridé” which recalls the “oison bridé” (another term for an unintelligent type). In Ezekiel 38:2, Gog, the enemy of God, is prince of “Tubal” (“confusion” in Hebrew), while in the book of Judith, “Holoferne,” Nebuchadnezzar’s general, is a persecutor of God’s people. But Tubal Holoferne was also the name of a waggish astrologist and author of a certain Prognostication nouvelle (Paris: 1478).

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

285

This rectifying measure,34 this “jeu des thèses opposées” (“game of opposing theses”), is also present at the stylistic level, as François Rigolot35 has shown: the juxtaposition of sentences constructed according to the same model and following each other at the same rhythm is a usual signature of the sophists’ method, while a hypotactic approach dominates the chapters dedicated to Ponocrates’s methods, so as to emphasize the effective interlinking of the activities with each other. This game is not without its own ambiguity however, and François Rigolot, like Michel Jeanneret,36 considers that the inordinately busy day prescribed and implemented by Ponocrates, with the aid of several young gentlemen (Anagnostes the good reader, Gymnaste the squire, and Rhizotome the herbalist), excessive in its encyclopedic claims and punctuated by the intellectual and physical feats of the giant, must not be taken entirely seriously. It is true that certain details are clearly comical, like the fact that, so as not to lose a single “heure du jour” (“hour of the day”), Ponocrates repeats and comments the most difficult passages of Holy Scripture read that same day while his student makes his “excretion des digestions naturelles” (“excretion of natural digestion”) (G, xxiii, 65; cw 55). It seems to be a burlesque metaphor for intellectual digestion, similar to the one Joachim Du Bellay will use in his Deffense et Illustration. But this does not subtract from the fact that Rabelais does formulate a humanist pedagogical ideal based on articulate and clear reading followed by commentary (of the Bible, the ancient authors, etc.), on observation (of the sky, the earth, but also of craftsmen and public institutions), on memorizing (constant repetition, recital, and recapitulation), on action (physical activities prepare the prince to be a man of court and a Christian knight), on “hygiène” (in the sense this word had in the 16th century, viz., the healthy regulation of the six “non-natural” things: air, nourishment and drink, sleeping and waking, exercise and rest, repletion and excretion, the passions of the soul), on piety, and on the pleasure of learning. What Ponocrates ultimately teaches his student is how to use his own judgment and become autonomous. And thus, it cannot be seen as an accident that the education sequence closes on the image of Gargantua building “plusieurs petitz engins automates: c’ està-dire: soy mouvens eulx mesmes” (“several little automatic machines, that is to say, which moved by themselves”).37

34 35 36 37

Jean Starobinski, “L’ ordre du jour,” Le temps de la réflexion 4 (1983): 106–114. Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: 1972, 1996), 55–76. Michel Jeanneret, “Gargantua 4–24: L’uniforme et le discontinu,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays on his Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 87–101. Olivier Zegna-Rata, “L’acheminement vers la parole, ou l’éducation de Gargantua,” er 30 (1995): 7–29.

286

le cadet

4.3 War Gargantua also extends the war sequence, passing from eleven (P, xxiii– xxxiii) to twenty-seven chapters (G, xxv–li). Rabelais no longer emphasizes the notion of mètis, man’s cunning, central to the war against the Dipsodes. Rather, he explores political reflection around the good prince and his counterpart, the tyrant. He also grants a much more significant role to the figure of the bad king. In Pantagruel, Anarche, emblem of the “diables de roys” (“these devils the kings”), who “ne sçavent ny ne valent rien, sinon à faire des maulx es pauvres subjectz, et à troubler tout le monde par guerre pour leur inique et detestable plaisir” (“know nothing [and are] good for nothing, except to do harm to their poor subjects, and trouble the whole world by making war, for their wicked and detestable pleasure”) (P, xxxi, 329; cw 237), was a secondary character, utterly idiotic and passive, and never given a voice (except to hawk “green sauce” after his defeat, P, xxxi, 329; cw 237). Picrochole, on the other hand, is a character of primary importance who appears in the titles of eleven chapters and often speaks. His name, from the Greek πιχρόχολος, “of bitter bile,” indicates a dysfunction of the humors that has disastrous political consequences: bilious (“colérique”), he is incapable of controlling his own emotions and is devoid of all prudence.38 As for the figure of the good king, it is present twice over in Gargantua, since the old Grandgousier,39 all the while symbolically entrusting power to his son, in a letter exhorting him to return from Paris (G, xxix), also plays his own significant political role during the war.40 He is presented as the model of the Christian prince, as conceived by Erasmus in his De institutione principis christiani (1515), a philosopher king in the Platonic mold, but inspired by Gospel (G, xlv). Above all else, like Pantagruel in his prayer before the battle with Loupgarou, he reveals himself to be pious, petitioning God’s intercession on several occasions, when he is near the chimney of his abode (G, xxviii), “à genous teste nue, encliné en un petit coing de son cabinet” (“on his knees, head bare, bent over a little nook of his study”) (G, xxxii, 89; cw 75) or “en son lict” (“in his bed”) (G, xlv, 121; cw 103). Then he shows himself to be a pacifist, in the manner of Erasmus, condemning imperialist politics and considering it a duty 38

39

40

The portrait of the choleric individual, as depicted by Ambroise Paré in his 1579 Œuvres (see Huchon, oc, 75, note 7), opposes that of the phlegmatic type (1083, note 16). Picrochole and Gargantua, who is “naturellement phlegmatique,” (“naturally phlegmatic”, G 21, 57; cw 50), therefore have opposite temperaments, in the medical sense of the term. His “pauvres espaules lasses et foibles” (“weary enfeebled shoulders”) no longer support his armor with ease, and his “main tremblante” (“trembling hand”) struggles to take up the lance and the mace (G 28, 83; cw 70). In contrast, the father figure disappears from Pantagruel in chapter 23, just as the war against the Dipsodes begins.

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

287

to avoid war by all means possible.41 He first sends an “ambassadeur,” Ulrich Gallet, to gather information on Picrochole’s war-mongering motivations (G, xxx–xxxi). Then, despite his aides counseling him to respond with force, he tries to buy peace by richly compensating Marquet, the fouacier from Picrochole’s camp who was behind the war (G, xxxii). The negotiations fail because of both Picrochole’s foolhardiness and also the poor counsel he receives: it is therefore only as a very last resort, and not in a spirit of conquest, that Grandgousier gives in to the call of war, “avecques dommaige de son prochain frere christian” (“with damage to our own Christian neighbor and brother”) (G, xlvi, 124; cw 105). A final royal virtue, liberality, is manifest in his generous compensation of Frère Jean (G, xlvi) and the “Gargantuist victors” (G, li), a generosity extended even to his enemies: the prisoner Toucquedillon (G, xlvi) and, years earlier, Alpharbal, king of Canarre (G, l). Rather than mistreating and ransoming them, he treats them with respect and offers them gifts, stirring in them also the desire to be virtuous. One may wonder whether this reflection on the good king is merely theoretical or if Rabelais perhaps had a particular king in mind. Abel Lefranc maintains that Rabelais, after the first of his three sojourns in Italy as Jean Du Bellay’s doctor and secretary, became a “publiciste et collaborateur dévoué du gouvernement royal” (“publicist and devoted collaborator of the royal government”).42 In such a role, he would have been tasked with royal propaganda, as was Jean Lemaire de Belges for Louis xii, or Ronsard for Henri iii. Whereas Pantagruel, published before this decisive sojourn, still seems to him “complètement étranger” (“completely foreign”) to “préoccupations de nature patriotiques” (“patriotic preoccupations”), excluding the modifications added to the list of the damned in Epistemon’s Hell narrative in the 1534 Juste edition, Gargantua is seen as marking, for the first time, Rabelais’s desire “de se faire l’ auxiliaire de la politique de François ier” (“to make himself the aide to the politics of Francis i”) by caricaturizing Charles v, his “born-rival.” Specifically, the council of war scenario, where Picrochole’s three counselors detail the future victories of their king, turn against Charles v the same anti-French criticism formulated by Thomas More in a comparable scene from the first book of his

41

42

See the chronological anthology Guerre et paix dans la pensée d’Érasme, compiled by JeanClaude Margolin (Paris: 1973); as well as my article “Le prince, le soldat et le chrétien: Le réquisitoire contre la guerre dans les Adages d’ Érasme,” in Lire, interpréter, transmettre les Adages d’Érasme. Proceedings of the Colloquium at the Université Paris-Ouest-Nanterre March 2014, ed. M.-D. Legrand (forthcoming). Abel Lefranc, “Rabelais et le pouvoir royal,” rss 17 (1930): 191–202; republished in his Rabelais: Études sur Gargantua, Pantagruel et le Tiers Livre (Paris: 1953), 359–371.

288

le cadet

1516 Utopia. It is not the king of France who has his eyes fixed on universal monarchy, it is the emperor of the German Holy Roman Empire (G, xxxiii). Abel Lefranc’s argument has been adopted by Georges Lote, Robert Marichal, Gérard Defaux, and Mireille Huchon, for whom the Rabelaisian fiction, in the manner of the Aeneid, a cryptic apology from the time of Augustus, constitutes a celebration of monarchy. Gargantua, then, would be the staging of Francis i’s imaginary revenge against his eternal enemy, Charles v, who beat him to the crown of the Holy Empire in 1519, imprisoned him after the Pavia disaster, held his two children hostage for an enormous ransom, and was behind the sack of Rome in 1527.43 Picrochole’s project to erect “deux colonnes plus magnificques que celles de Hercules” (“two columns more magnificent than those of Hercules”) (G, xxxiii, 92; cw 78) and his exclamation “passons oultre” (“let’s go on”) (G, xxxiii, 95; cw 80) are also a nod to the motto “Plus oultre” from the emperor’s coat of arms, which features these same pillars of Hercules. Set on either side of the straits of Gibraltar, these marked, in antiquity, the symbolic frontiers of the known world. But far from conquering the world, Picrochole-Charles v would end up reduced to the status of a “pauvre gaignedenier” (“poor porter”), vainly awaiting the coming of the mythical “coquecigrues” (“cocklicranes”) so that his kingdom can be restored to him (G, xlix, 132; cw 111). Other commentators, like Nicole Aronson, are rather of the opinion that the political reflection is more abstract and more a case of endeavoring, in a general sense, to sketch out the image of an ideal king.44 Would Rabelais, after all, not have been too independent a figure to stand as a mere agent of royalty? His political thought seems to be predominantly idealist, particularly regarding royal service. Grandgousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel are thus less to be seen as the avatars of contemporary kings (Louis xii, Francis i, Henri ii) and more as Utopian kings; debonair and joined with their people through a fair contract, receiving of their counsel, guaranteeing the material and spiritual protection of their subjects, and obedient to an ethical and religious code. 4.4 Religious Satire Lastly, Gargantua is the occasion for Rabelais to compose a much more incisive religious satire45 than in Pantagruel, in which such satire appears only intermittently, mainly in the library catalog of Saint-Victor, in the dialogue between 43 44 45

oc, 1044–1045. Nicole Aronson, Les idées politiques de Rabelais (Paris: 1973). On Rabelaisian satire in general, see Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’ Herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007).

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

289

Panurge and Alcofribas stigmatizing the sale of indulgences and the rapacity of the Popes, or in Epistemon’s description of Hell, which again features several Popes. First of all, in the context of the struggle led by the royal milieu and the Evangelicals against the Faculty of Theology in Paris in 1533–1534,46 Rabelais stigmatizes the theologians, whom he contrasts to the “prescheurs evangelicques” (“Evangelical preachers”) (G, xvii and xxiv) and the “bon docteur evangelicque et pedagoge” (“good Evangelicalist teaching doctor”) (G, xl, 111; cw 93). The “theologastres,” “théologiens du ventre” (“theologians of the stomach”) lampooned in a famous farce attributed to Louis de Berquin,47 are the very incarnation, according to the Evangelicals, of a deteriorating rational theology which is nothing more than pedantic sophistry. Rabelais dismantles their conception of faith,48 their obscurantist erudition, and the commentaries they string together one after the other.49 He also attacks their pedagogy through the caricatures of the two instructors trained at the Sorbonne, Thubal Holoferne and Jobelin Bridé, to whom Philippe des Marays, Grandgousier’s friend and Eudemon’s master, refers to as “resveurs mateologiens” (G, xv, 44; cw 39). This last portmanteau word, borrowed from Erasmus, fuses “théologiens” with the Greek ματαιολόγοι (“vain speech” according to Saint Paul, from ματαιος, “vain, idol,” and λόγοι, “speech”) and is used to label theologians whose speech is vacuous or frivolous. Finally, their scholastic way of speaking, their dirtiness, and their overindulgence are all denounced via the “harangue” (in very poor Latin), peppered with burlesque onomatopoeia, delivered by Janotus de Bragmardo, the magister noster chosen and dispatched by the Faculty of Theology to recuperate the bells of Notre-Dame (G, xix). It is, however, to be noted that the 1542 Juste editions of Pantagruel and Gargantua systematically replace the terms “théologien(s),” “sorbonagre(s),” and “sorboniste(s)” by the term “sophiste(s),” a label referring generally to the master of rhetoric and philosophy in Ancient

46 47 48

49

See Screech, Rabelais, 208–218; Defaux, “Rabelais et les cloches de Notre-Dame,” er 9 (1971): 1–28. La Farce des Théologastres, ed. C. Longeon (Geneva: 1989). M. Screech demonstrates this in the first part of his book on L’Évangélisme de Rabelais, (er) 2 (Geneva: 1959). In a “key paragraph” of chapter vi, from which some few sentences were cut out in 1542, he sees a consideration of the nature of faith as trust in God and not superstitious belief. Rigolot sees the episode of the ass-wipes, which the young Gargantua closes by claiming his opinion is shared by “Master John of Scotland” (i.e., Duns Scotus, the “Subtle Doctor” and defender of the realism of universals), as a violent attack on scholastic philosophy. See Rigolot, “Rabelais et la scolastique: Une affaire de canards (Gargantua 12)”, in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book, 102–123.

290

le cadet

Greece and, in the 16th century, to the professor of dialectics at the Faculty of Arts. This modification has been interpreted as a measure of prudence, similar in motivation to the removal of the list of the Parisians’ swear words at a time when laws were being drawn up en masse to stamp out the proliferation of blasphemy in France (G, xvii, 48 var. c). It may, however, be better explained by a simple change of circumstances: the combat against the Sorbonne was old news by 1542.50 Rabelais also goes after the idol worshiping of the saints, just as Erasmus had in chapter xl of The Praise of Folly, in the 4th canon of The Manual of a Christian Knight, in a letter to Bishop Sadolet, and in his Colloquia. Several characters in Gargantua embody the pagan-styled derivations of such worship: the Parisians who swear by all the saints of their parishes (G, xvii, 49; cw 42); the “pauvres diables de moines” (“monks, poor devils”) from the abbey of Seuillé who know not “auquel de leurs saincts se vouer” (“which one of their saints to offer their prayers to”) (G, xxvii, 77; cw 66); and Picrochole’s soldiers, massacred by Frère Jean despite their numerous cries for assistance to various saints, in what is a rather burlesque enumeration (G, xxvii, 80; cw 68). But the satire communicates itself most strikingly through the picture of the six pilgrims, indoctrinated by unscrupulous preachers, who return from “sainct Sebastian prés de Nantes” (“Saint-Sébastien near Nantes”) (G, xlv, 122; cw 88). Everything is orchestrated, in the vein of Erasmus, in such a way as to turn the tale of their derisory “faicts et dicts” (“deeds and sayings”) to ridicule. They appear for the first time in chapter xxxviii, where they go through a series of adventures that “l’ un de leur compagnie nommé, Lasdaller” (“their companion called Trudgealong”) reinterprets through the optic of Psalm cxxiv (cxxiii), as though Scripture were able to predict everyday events, then made all the more implausible when the everyday has become as fantastical as what is to be retold. At the end of the chapter, the narrator provisionally abandons the pilgrims, as they sleep “en une loge prés le Couldray” (“in a shack near le Couldray”). We pick up with them again, five chapters later, in the same place, except that there are now strangely only five of them. In any case, they are come upon, in their shack, by “[une] escarmouche de Picrochole” (“Picrochole’s scouting party”) led by Count Tyravant, whereupon they are carried off “comme s’ilz feussent espies” (“as if they were

50

This is Huchon’s point of view. In her edition, oc 1051, she remarks that the term “évangelicque” is no longer to be found in the Tiers Livre or Quart Livre, and that the Sorbonne is only there alluded to once, and this in an uncontroversial way, in the expression “en tentative de Sorbone” (“at a thesis defense in the Sorbonne”) (tl 1, 384; cw 289). See also her “Rabelais et les théologiens,” in Religion et littérature à la Renaissance, ed. F. Roudaut (Paris: 2012), 121–135.

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

291

spies”) (G, xliii, 117; cw 99). Frère Jean frees them a little later, in chapter xliiii, before bringing them to the house of Grandgousier in chapter xlv. This is the culmination of the pilgrim satire: through the person of Grandgousier, Rabelais pronounces a merciless condemnation of those that blaspheme the “justes et sainctz de dieu” (“God’s just men and saints”). Lastly, the monks present a golden opportunity for religious satire, notably enacted by Frère Jean, almost always referred to simply as “le moine” and defined initially as a “vray moyne si oncques en feut depuys que le monde moynant moyna de moynerie” (“[a] real monk if ever there was one since the monking world first monked in monkery”) (G, xxvii, 78; cw 66). In chapters xxxix–xli, where Gargantua invites him to celebrate his victorious defense of the abbey of Seuillé and to discuss any further strategy, Frère Jean humorously displays five of the vices attributed to monks not only in medieval satire, but also, closer to the time, in Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae (1511) and in Luther’s De votis monasticis (1522). Above all, he is a heavy drinker whose prayer book is actually a book-shaped bottle with a little wine inside (G, xli, 113; cw 96). He is also a glutton, comparing his belly to a bottomless container, like either “la botte sainct Benoist” (“Saint Benedict’s Boot”) or “la gibbessiere d’ un advocat” (“an advocate’s pouch”) (G, xxxix, 107; cw 90). He is raffish, with “un beau nez” (“a fine nose”), a sign of sexual virility according to a very old, bawdy tradition (G, xl, 112; cw 94). He is an ignoramus, surprised even when he learns that a “moyne sçavant” (“learned monk”) might exist (G, xxxix, 109; cw 91). Finally, he is given to “orner [s]on langage” (“[he] adorns [his] speech”) with swear words aplenty (G, xxxix, 109; cw 92). But despite all of these vices that he has in common with the traditional monks of satire, Frère Jean is more like the anti-monk who embodies the Rabelaisian aesthetic of inversion. Indeed, in the introductory portrait painted of him, he is presented as a jeune guallant: frisque: de hayt: bien à dextre, hardy: adventureux, deliberé: hault, maigre, bien fendu de gueule, bien advantagé en nez, beau despescheur d’heures, beau desbrideur de messes, beau descroteur de vigiles. [young, gallant, frisky, cheerful, very deft, bold, adventurous, resolute, tall, thin, with a wide open throat, well fixed for a nose, a great dispatcher of hours, a great unbridler of masses, a fine polisher-off of vigils]. G, xxvii, 78; cw 66

The list first and foremost underscores the character’s cheerful disposition and activism. Indeed, we first encounter a Frère Jean swelled with the energy and

292

le cadet

commitment of his defense of the abbey vineyard. Through him, as Michael Screech has shown, Rabelais establishes a theology of synergism: man must “work together” with God in order to be saved.51 Furthermore, the last three items on the list highlight his distrust for Catholic liturgy, whether this be in relation to the monastic hours or to mass: “les heures sont faictez pour l’ homme et non l’homme pour les heures” (“hours are made for man, not man for hours”), he says in chapter xli. Nor does he superstitiously attach some kind of magical power to prayers, as do the Seuillé monks who murmur a prayer book response in order to make the enemy flee (G, xxvii), or the sacristan who credits “quelque oraison” (“some oration”) with the power to protect against cannon balls (G, xlii). And so, it is only logical that it will fall to this anti-monk, in the last seven chapters of Gargantua, at the climax of the Rabelaisian satire of “constitutions humaines” (“human institutions”) (P, xxix, 318; cw 227) and “ocieux moines” “refuyz du monde” (“idle monks” “shunned by everyone”) (G, xl), to found a new abbey instituted, from the foundations up, “au contraire de toutes aultres” (“in the opposite way from all the others”) (G, lii, 137; cw 116). Theleme is proposed, in fact, as the precise antithesis, not only of the Benedictine Abbeys of Bourgueil and Saint-Florent (G, lii), but also of the fictionalized Abbey of Seuillé, whose vines Frère Jean had so valiantly defended. This systematic play of opposites has a humor of its own, presented as early as the first chapter of the sequence where the seven anti-laws are pronounced, and then further developed throughout the descriptive chapters. The architecture of the abbey, along with its insertion into the open Touraine countryside, makes visible the refusal of enclosure and of authority (G, liii–lv). With no walls around it, the abbey is open to the outside world and all received there should be free to leave again when they themselves deem it appropriate. On top of this, the symmetrical arrangement of the “belles grandes” (“fine big”) libraries to the north-west and the “belles grandes” galleries of paintings to the south-east, mark the triumph of humanism and culture over monastic austerity and ignorance (G, liii). Finally, the “basse cour” (“inner court”), centered around a fountain representing the three Graces with their “cornes d’abondance” (“cornucopia”), replaces the traditional cloister with a space where sensuality and spirituality come together (G, lv). The physical and moral image of the Thelemites (G, lvi–lvii) only confirms what the architecture had already declared: this new religion stands against the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience that rule over traditional monasteries. Renouncement of material things gives way to a richly luxurious

51

Screech, Rabelais, 228–245.

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

293

dress code. Sexual interdiction opens itself up to a desire that is carefully nurtured according to the principles of love and courtship, as hinted at by the chivalric vocabulary and loving devotion, as well as the fact that it is the ladies who, according to “leur franc vouloir” and “arbitre” (“their own free will”), would decide what livery the community, as one, should wear from day to day. Last but not least, obedience disappears beneath a wave of individual freedom, as is made most clear by the famous “clause” to which all Thelemite rule can be reduced: all its laws and precepts boil down to just, “fay ce que vouldras” (“do what you will”) (G, lvii, 149; cw 126). The Thelemites are no longer “religious” in the weak sense of the term, i.e., men who live locked up, obeying formal codes which enchain them: now they are “religious” in the strong and etymological sense; free individuals, creating bonds between themselves and with God. However, swept along by his creative momentum, Rabelais transforms what, perhaps to begin with, had been only an anti-abbey into a princely dwelling which solidifies a literary,52 political, architectural,53 moral, and religious ideal. In this way, Theleme, sitting by the river Loire rather than on some distant island, in some fantastical elsewhere, no longer appears as a failed Utopia, undermined by a “style monocorde” (“mono-chord style”), by the exclusion of much of humanity, i.e., those who do not meet certain physical and moral criteria, or by the tendency towards conformism displayed by residents bound to a cult of appearances.54 It even less resembles any totalitarian anti-Utopia.55 Rabelais clearly intended to finish his book with the vision of a new religious order which makes the exercise of Christian liberty56 a reality and which announces the “New Jerusalem” where the struggle between flesh and spirit will be resolved.57 It is a matter of trusting fully in the abilities of certain chosen ones58 to conduct themselves virtuously when they are free. The legislative and judiciary arsenal that usually rules over Utopias and controls human urges is here replaced by a complete absence of institutional constraint. Frère Jean’s

52

53 54 55 56 57 58

The description of Theleme is heavily inspired by Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). See Gilles Polizzi, “Thélème ou l’ éloge du don: Le texte rabelaisien à la lumière de l’ Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” rhr 27 (December 1987): 39–59. See Huchon, oc, 1044. This is the interpretation advanced by Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais, 77–98. André Glucksmann, Les maîtres penseurs (Paris: 1977). Screech, Rabelais, 253–257. Stéphan Geonget, La notion de perplexité à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2006), 407. On this elitism, which is less sociocultural than moral and spiritual, see Michael Baraz, “Rabelais et l’ utopie,” er 15 (1980) 1–30, p. 10; and Maxwell Gauna, “Fruitful Fields and Blessed Spirits, or Why the Thelemites Were Well Born,” er 15 (1980): 117–128.

294

le cadet

abbey59 is an anarchy in the etymological sense (from the Greek, an, “without,” and arkhê, “power”) since no one wields any power liable to encroach on the freedom of others. Yet, miraculously, the individual will coincides with the collective will, as is seen from the freely accepted uniformity of dress code in chapter lvi, or from the repeated syntactic pattern in chapter lvii: “Si quelq’ un ou quelcune disoit ‘beuvons.’ tous buvoient. Si disoit ‘jouons.’ tous jouoient. Si disoit ‘allons à l’esbat es champs.’ tous y alloient” (“If some man or woman said: ‘Let’s drink,’ they all drank; if one said: ‘Let’s go play in the fields,’ they all went”) (G, lvii, 149; cw 126). Further still, the individual will, in its most spontaneous aspect (desire) coincides with the divine will, as indicated by the very name of the Abbey: the neologism “Theleme,” constructed from the Greek Thelema (“will”), refers, in fact, not only to the Gospels, where it is the usual term for the will of God,60 but also to the nymph Thelemia, allegory of amorous desire in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

5

Playing with the Universal Library

Beyond the pedagogical, political, and religious angles, Rabelais also uses Gargantua to deepen the intertextual dialogue he had begun in Pantagruel. He plays with Scripture and its exegeses, with a very wide selection of ancient Greek and Latin texts,61 as well as with contemporary scholarly Latin works: Liber de differentia vulgarium linguarum et gallici sermonis varietate by Charles

59

60 61

The patronage of a drinking, gluttonous, raffish, and foul-mouthed ignoramus monk may seem quite surprising for an abbey that is to unite inhabitants of such incredible physical and moral qualities, strengthened by education. But far from compromising the coherency of the episode, this patronage may well be a necessary condition for it to be coherent. In any case, this is what André Tournon proposes (“L’abbé de Thélème”: Saggi e ricerche di Letteratura Francese 26 [1987]: 201–220), stating that Frère Jean furnishes “à la liberté thélémique le grain de folie qui l’ authentifie, à l’ utopie ses assises profondes dans le roman d’ où elle surgit” (“[furnishes] the Thelemic freedom with the grain of madness needed to authenticate it, [and] the Utopia with the deep foundations within the novel from which it rises”). Per Nykrog, “Thélème, Panurge et la Dive bouteille,” rhlf 65.3 (1965): 385–397. For example, the prologue and the “propos des bienyvres” (“palaver of the potted”) are inspired from Lucian’s work Bacchus (according to Huchon, oc, 1040–1041). Similarly, the plans concocted by Picrochole and his council should be read in the light of the dialogue between Cineas and Pyrrhus, as related in Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus, and the arguments advanced by Samippus as he justifies his wish to be king in Lucian’s dialogue Navigium seu Vota (The Ship or the Wishes). See Jean Plattard, L’Œuvre de François Rabelais (Sources, Invention et Composition) (1910; repr. Paris: 1967), 207–208.

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

295

de Bovelles, Emblemata by Alciat, Politian’s Opera (G, Prol. and xxiv), not forgetting the numerous miscellanies like André Tiraqueau’s legal treatises (G, iii), the Officina by Ravisius Textor62 (G, x) and the Adagiorum chiliades by Erasmus (G, xi). But Rabelais’s library is also a vernacular one. Indeed, the writer weaves a dialogue between the chronicles and the hagiographies, also tying in the medieval works of chivalric romance which had been edited or re-edited in the 16th century. Abounding in the text are numerous allusions to farces and mysteries,63 to the poetry and artwork of his time,64 as well as to a variety of contemporary French works like Champ Fleury by Geoffroy Tory (1529) (G, ix). The world of giants is above all a world of books which, taking a leaf from the characters’ own enthusiasm, are to be thumbed through, glossed, confronted, and played with. The Rabelaisian text presumes a critical and learned reader,65 capable of deciphering the meaning and scope of a quote that is manifest or implicit, faithful or falsified, acting either as a cohort or a challenger to the author.66 The “plus hault sens” (“higher sense”) of Rabelais’s Livres, reserved for the initiated, may even be first and foremost a philological sense: the core may not reside in the political, economic, instructional, religious, or moral “message” at all, but rather in the “mode de cryptage intertextuel voulu par Rabelais” (“mode of intertextual encryption intended by Rabelais”).67

6

Playing with Language

This intertextual game is met by a game of language which reflects the linguistic debates of the 16th century. Principally, Gargantua carries forward the incredible illustration of the French language already framed within Pantagruel. In the tradition of the early 16th-century Italian debates to define the Italian language, and modeling himself after Dante’s quest for an “illustrious vernacular,” Rabelais promotes the idea of creating “un français illustre,” an extraordinary literary language, artificial from a lexical, orthographical, and syntactic point

62 63 64 65 66 67

Le Cadet, “Rabelais et l’Officina de Ravisius Textor: Pantagruel, i et Gargantua, x,” L’Année rabelaisienne 2 (2018): 253–282. Le Cadet, Rabelais et le théâtre (Paris: 2020). See Huchon’s comments on chapter 13, oc, 1098, note 8. Le Cadet, “ ‘Beuveurs tresillustres, et vous Verolez tresprecieux’: Rabelais et les Anagnostes,” rhlf 2 (2015): 261–282. Raphaël Cappellen, “Feueilleter papiers, quotter cayers”: La citation au regard de l’erudito ludere des fictions rabelaisiennes, PhD thesis (Tours: 2013). Menini, Rabelais altérateur, 964.

296

le cadet

of view.68 Gargantua is particularly impressive in its coining of new words or new French meanings (formal and semantic neologisms, respectively), several of which have survived until today.69 The book borrows massively from foreign languages, either directly or through Gallicization. Thus, it introduces into French words of Latin origin such as elabourer (G, Pr.), ethrusques, blatte (G, i), stri[é], medical, spirale (G, viii), factices (G, xii) exulcere[r] (G, xiii), pampre (G, xiii et xl), turbines (G, xix), excretion, excremens, frugal (G, xxiii), intemperie, incommode (G, xxiv). Similarly, it introduces numerous Greek terms like alteres (G, xxiii), automates (G, xxiv), hippiatrie (G, xxxvi), acromion (G, xliii), panique (G, xliv). Several Hellenisms are also borrowed through the medium of Latin, such as homonymie (G, ix), perinee (G, xiii), anagnoste (G, xxiii) and athletique (G, xxviii). Gargantua then borrows from vernacular languages like Italian, which provides equestrian terms (donner cent quarieres, cheval barbe, G, xxiii), gaming words (balle, G, xxiii, xxxvii and lv; tarau G, xxii), and also everyday terms (charesse G, xxix, piston G, xxii). The loan words from the various Patois dialects are also many, like in chapter xxv, for instance, rich in its dialectic vocabulary: Baugears, deposcher, and tribard appear here for the first time ever in print. Beyond these loan words, Rabelais also devises new terms by playing variously with compositions and derivations,70 not to mention his numerous portmanteau inventions.71 Independently from these nationalist concerns, Rabelais’s work on language investigates the concept of copia, which the De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (1512), a brief pedagogical treatise by Erasmus, had made famous. The copia, inseparably associated with symbols of abundance (horn of plenty, natural productivity, sexual fertility, food and drink, etc.), and whose duplicity Terence Cave underlines in Cornucopia (1979), is especially remarkable in the very many enumerations that punctuate Gargantua: the enumeration of ten

68

69

70 71

Huchon, “Rabelais et le vulgaire illustre,” in La langue de Rabelais et la langue de Montaigne. Actes du colloque de Rome, septembre 2003, eds. J. Céard and F. Giacone, (er) 48 (Geneva: 2009), 19–39. Kurt Baldinger counts some 800 neologisms in Gargantua. See his Études autour de Rabelais, (er) 23 (Geneva: 1990), and his Etymologisches Wörterbuch zu Rabelais (Gargantua) (Tübingen: 2001). For instance, from the verbal element “-forme” he creates both “caseiforme” (G, Prol) and “carminiforme” (G, xix). The adjective “torcheculatif,” for example, formed out of the noun “torchecul” and the adjective “spéculatif” (G, xiii), or the verb “rataconniculer” which not only accents the syllables “con” and “cul” but also seems to fuse the verb “rataconner” (“racommoder”— “mend” or “patch up”) and the Latin noun cunniculus (which is the root of “connil” or “connin” in French, i.e., “rabbit” but also “female genitalia”) (G, iii).

the prequel gargantua: an original reworking of pantagruel

297

epithets which describe Gargantua’s cornucopian codpiece (G, vii); the enumeration of 70 proverbs young Gargantua applies literally; the eleven different names for the giant’s codpiece (G, xi); the fifty-eight ass-wipes (G, xiii); the twenty-eight “epithetes diffamatoires” (“defamatory epithets”) the fouaciers use to insult the shepherds (G, xxv); the seventeen intercessor saints called upon by Picrochole’s soldiers; the twelve verbs used to color Frère Jean’s massacre of these troops (G, xxvii); or the enumerations displayed on the “grande porte de Theleme” (“great gate of Thélème”) (G, liv). Gargantua even gives a long list of 217 games (card games, table games, skill games, etc.), presented vertically in the 1542 Juste edition: apart from its satirical elements, this list draws the reader’s attention to Alcofribas’s verbal and encyclopedic prowess, skilled in infinitely varying his speech and remembering all the games of an entire age. Lastly, the language play in which Gargantua engages must also be considered in the light of another linguistic debate of the 16th century: the debate on the origin of language. While Rabelais certainly shares the majority view of the grammarians and philosophers of language of his time on the arbitrariness of linguistic signs, he still also entertains the idea of seeking natural links between words and things. The theory of the arbitrariness of signs seems to be balanced in Rabelais by what Gérard Genette calls a secondary Cratylism (or mimologism).72 This seems to be indicated not only by the profusion of puns,73 homophones which are most certainly not senseless (such as the rebuses and plays on words which feature in certain emblems and which the narrator vehemently condemns, G, ix), but also by the onomastic creations.74 Rabelais breathes new life into certain pre-existing place or personal names by means of facetious etiological tales that introduce some fantastical etymology. The name “Beauce” is thus seen as being born of Gargantua’s admiring exclamation at the countryside around him, “Je trouve beau ce” (“I think this is beautiful”) (G, xvi, 47; cw 41). The name Paris is said to result from a bad joke on its inhabitants, drowned in the giant’s urine “par rys,” if not from the Greek “parrhesia,” referring to the forthright speech of its “quelque peu oultrecuydez” (“just a bit arrogant”) people (G, xvii). Similarly, Gargantua’s own name is explained by a burlesque etymology, “que grand tu as” (“How big yours is!”), in an opening scene based 72 73

74

Gérard Genette, Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie (Paris: 1976). So, in chapter 5, the transitive verb “entonner (un motet),” the “flaccon” closed “à viz” or the “planettes” created by God hint, respectively, at the intransitive verb “entonner” (“mettre en tonne”), the “flac con” (= the flaccid “cunt”) “à vit” (= the male sex) and “les platz netz” (= “empty plates”) of the merry drinkers (G, v). Rigolot, Poétique et onomastique: L’ exemple de la Renaissance (Geneva: 1977); Huchon, “Variations rabelaisiennes sur l’ imposition du nom,” in Prose et prosateurs de la Renaissance (Paris: 1988), 93–100.

298

le cadet

around the “imposition of the name” topos (G, vii, 23; cw 21). Whatever the case, the etymological innovation humorously reinforces the link uniting the proper noun to its referent. But it is above all in the proper nouns Rabelais invents “à plaisir” (“by […] pleasure”) (Tiers Livre, xix, 409; cw 311) that he amuses himself by underlining this link. Far from being purely conventional, as advanced by Hermogenes in Plato’s Cratylus, people’s names (anthroponyms) and place names (toponyms) sometimes work as a description or even a narrative device (Captain Tripet is created to be “estripé” [“gutted”] by Gymnaste, G, xxxv and xliii), and other times they work as a puzzle to solve (Theleme). They are not, for Rabelais, mere “rigid designators” (Saul Kripke), devoid of signifieds; they are words soaked in meaning. The contingency of signs does not exist in the world of fiction where everything is moved by a poet demiurge, a builder with living stones.

chapter 12

The Third Book Diane Desrosiers

In 1546, fourteen years after the appearance of the first book of Pantagruel, François Rabelais published, under his own name using his title, Doctor of Medicine, his Third book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of the Good Pantagruel,1 dedicated to Marguerite de Navarre, sister of King Francis i.2 The work, printed in italics and protected for six years by a royal privilège dated 19 September 1545,3 came from the Parisian presses of Chrestien Wechel, a printer-bookseller close to French Evangelicals and publisher of learned Greek and Latin books, among them works by Erasmus and Lucian. Following a long silence, to be 1 This is the first work of fiction Rabelais signed with his own name. In addition to his professional title, doctor, in the first edition he added the title “Calloïer des Isles Hieres.” On the significance of this phrase, see Mireille Huchon, “Notes et variantes,” oc, 1359–1361. The authorship of Pantagruel and Gargantua was attributed to “Master Alcofribas, abstractor of Quintessence”. However, the anagrammed pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier associated with François Rabelais does not appear in these works. 2 The first three of the chronicles of Pantagruel start with a ten-line liminary poem. In the case of the Third Book, the poem, “François Rabelais to the Spirit of the Queen of Navarre,” (cw 248), is an invitation to the king’s sister: “Wouldn’t you care for just a while to go/ Out of the heavenly manor where you dwell,/ To see in their third section here below/ The joyous deeds of good Pantagruel?” (“François Rabelais à l’ esprit de la royne de Navarre,” oc 341: “[…] çà bas veoir une tierce partie / Des faictz joyeux du bon Pantagruel?”). See Mary B. McKinley, “Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre et la dédicace du Tiers Livre: Voyages mystiques et missions terrestres,” Romanic Review 94 (2003): 169–184. 3 See Michèle Clément, “Rabelais et ses privilèges. Un autre accès à la pratique auctoriale?” in Inextinguible Rabelais, ed. M. Huchon (Paris: 2021), 95–117. In 1552, the Tiers Livre was republished in Roman font by Michel Fezandat in Paris with a privilège for ten years from King Henri ii. This edition, considered definitive, contains 52 chapters rather than 47. Immediately on its publication, the Tiers Livre was reprinted and republished. See Michael A. Screech and Stephen Rawles, A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais before 1626 (er) 20 (Geneva: 1987). For modern, critical, and learned editions of the Tiers Livre, consult Jean Céard, “Bibliographie sur Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre,” Vox poetica (2007). www.vox‑poetica.com/​ sflgc/concours/rablaisbiblio.html, Marie-Claire Thomine, “Naissance du roman moderne, Rabelais: Le Tiers Livre,” Seizième siècle 3 (2007): 267–278, Guy Demerson and Myriam Marrache-Gouraud (eds.), François Rabelais (Bibliographie des écrivains français) 32 (RomeParis: 2010), as well as Olivier Séguin-Brault, “Bibliographie des études rabelaisiennes (2007– 2018),” in Almanach de “L’Année rabelaisienne,” https://anneerab.hypotheses.org/bibliograph ie. See also Huchon, “Le Tiers Livre édité par Jean Céard” and Jean Céard, “Le Tiers Livre édité par Mireille Huchon,” in Le Tiers Livre. Actes du Colloque international de Rome, mars 1996, ed. F. Giacone (er) 37 (Geneva: 1999), 99–106 and 107–114. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_014

300

desrosiers

attributed, Rabelais writes, to “the calumny of certain cannibals, misanthropes, agelastes [humorless people]” who had been so “atrocious and irrational” that he had decided “not to write one more jot of this,”4 he became the author of a tale quite different from his two earlier “chronicles,” but which continued directly from the conquest of the land of the Dipsodes at the end of Pantagruel. While Gargantua and his son Pantagruel were the principal protagonists of the first two eponymous narratives, Panurge is the central character of the Third Book which is primarily concerned, at least at the literal level, with resolving his matrimonial dilemma: should Pantagruel’s companion marry or not? And, if he marries, will his wife deceive him?5 Just as the prologue of Gargantua used Socrates, the first part of the prologue of the Third Book recounts the story of the Cynic philosopher Diogenes during the siege of Corinth. Having spent several days silently contemplating its citizens busily shoring up the town’s fortifications, Diogenes, not wishing to remain idle, decides to participate actively in the defense of the city. He goes to “Cranion, a hill and promontory near Corinth,” and there, “not being employed by the magistrates to do anything” (cw 255); (“à aultre office n’ estant pour la republicque employé.” oc 348), he takes part in the Corinthians’ military endeavors in his own way, that is, by moving his barrel. The accumulation of action verbs is the most notable attribute of the modifications Rabelais made to the text in 1552. Nearly thirty verbs describe the preparations for the siege of Corinth, and more than sixty illustrate the philosopher’s actions.6 It would appear that Rabelais broadly reworked this description taken from Lucian of Samosata’s How to Write History,7 to which Epistémon refers in chapter 24 of

4 cw, 423: “Liminary Epistle (of January 28, 1552) To the Very Illustrious Prince and Most Reverend Monseigneur Odet, Cardinal de Chastillon.” oc 519: “À tresillustre prince, et reverendissime mon seigneur Odet cardinal de Chastillon,” (“Mais la calumnie de certains Canibales, misantropes, agelastes, avoit tant contre moy esté atroce et desraisonnée, qu’elle avoir vaincu ma patience: et plus n’ estois deliberé en escrire un Iota.”). 5 Abel Lefranc interprets this examination of marriage and the considerations concerning the nature of women that follow from it in the light of the Querelle des femmes in which there was renewed interest at this time. See Lefranc, Rabelais: Études sur Gargantua, Pantagruel, le Tiers Livre (Paris: 1953), 286, 309. For his part, Screech has clearly shown that Panurge’s conjugal plans belong to the debate between celibacy and marriage that was current in the early sixteenth century. See Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’s religion, ethics and comic philosophy (London: 1958). 6 François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (er) 10 (Geneva: 1972), 99–104. 7 Lucian of Samosata, “ ‘How to Write History’ (De ratione conscribendæ historiæ),” in The Works of Lucian, vol. 8, trans. K. Kilburn (Cambridge, MA: 1959), 1–74. See Romain Menini, Rabelais altérateur: “Graeciser en François” (Paris: 2014), 417–435. For a study comparing Rabelais’s text and Lucian’s see Clément, Le Cynisme à la Renaissance: D’Érasme à Montaigne

the third book

301

the Third Book.8 This anecdote, which was a literary topos at the time, is also found in Erasmus’s Adages and Apophthegms9 and in Guillaume Budé’s preface to his Annotations to the Pandects.10 Several commentators on Rabelais have interpreted the motions of Diogenes’ barrel as a parody of the Corinthians’ military efforts.11 The Cynic philosopher would be ridiculing the uselessness of his fellow citizens’ preparation for war. However, there is no sign of parodic intent to be found either in Lucian’s source text, or in Budé’s use of it, and Rabelais seems to distance himself from Erasmus’s interpretation of the motion of the barrel as meaningless. Following Lucian and Budé, he seems to use the anecdote as a justification of his decision to return to writing. Like them, he associates the motion of Diogenes’s barrel with writing his own book and presents his works as a contribution to his contemporaries’ activity.12

8

9

10 11

12

(Geneva: 2005), 132–135; Edwin M. Duval, “Pantagruel’s chanson de ricochet and Rabelais’s art et manière d’escrire histoire,” in Rabelais in Context. Proceedings of the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference, ed. B.C. Bowen (Birmingham, AL: 1993), 21–38; Christiane LauvergnatGagnière, “Rabelais, lecteur de Lucien de Samosate,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 30 (1978): 71–86, and the same author’s “Renaissance et métamorphose de l’Histoire vraie de Lucien,” Revue des sciences humaines 180.4 (1980): 119–133, as well as her monograph Lucien de Samosate et le lucianisme en France au xvie siècle: Athéisme et polémique (Geneva: 1988). See also Jean Plattard, L’Œuvre de Rabelais (sources, invention, composition) (1910; repr. Paris: 1967), 294–296, and chapter five of Claude-Albert Mayer, Lucien de Samosate et la Renaissance française (Geneva: 1984). cw, 325: “[T]he art and manner of writing history, handed down by the philosopher of Samosata.” oc 425: “[…] l’ art et manière d’ escrire histoires, baillée par le philosophe Samosatoys.” Erasmus, Adages, iv, iii, 6, “Volvitur dolium: A barrel rolls easily,” Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 36, trans. B.I. Knott-Sharpe and J.N. Grant (Toronto: 2006), 7. Rabelais’s admiration for Erasmus is well known. Guillaume Budé, Opera omnia, vol. 3 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: 1969), a 2. Thomas M. Greene understands the prologue of the Third Book as deliberately and willfully supporting ambiguity, see his “The Unity of the Tiers Livre,” in Rabelais en son demimillénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.C. Margolin (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 293–299. In his article “Structure and Meaning in the Prologue to the Tiers Livre,” L’ esprit créateur 3.2 (1963): 57–62, Floyd Gray summarizes the various interpretations of this episode. In the eyes of Lefranc, the prologue of the Third Book suggests the defense of the city of Paris against a possible Imperial attack at the end of July 1536; see François Rabelais, Œuvres, vol. 5, ed. A. Lefranc (Paris: 1931), xxii and 7, n. 21. Marcel Françon suggests instead reading it as an “allusion to the panic in Paris in September 1544” in “Note sur le Tiers Livre de Rabelais,”er 8 (1969): 79–83, and by the same author, “Note sur le prologue du Tiers Livre et l’ invasion de la Champagne en 1544,” er 9 (1971): 127–128. Whether the prologue of the Third Book refers to the various French wars against Charles v or to efforts to reform the

302

desrosiers

In the second part of the prologue, the narrator makes the connection between himself and Diogenes explicit, showing him in action, participating in his own way in the defense of the city of Corinth: “I thought I would perform no useless and importunate exercise if I agitated my Diogenic barrel” (cw 257) (“Je pareillement […] ay pensé ne faire exercice inutile et importun, si je remuois mon tonneau Diogenic.” oc 348–349). Then he interrogates his readers: “By this dingledangling of my barrel, what do you think I will accomplish?” (cw 257) (“À ce triballement de tonneau, que feray je en vostre advis?” oc 349). And, having had a drink, he explains that he has decided to “serve the one and the other sort of folk” (cw 257); (“servir et es uns et es autres.” oc 349). With the help of three examples, he makes the nature of this service clear. First, he identifies his actions with those of two mythological figures: “Among the diggers, pioneers, and rampart-builders, I will do what Neptune and Apollo did in Troy under Laomedon” (cw 257) (“Envers les vastadours, pionniers et rempareurs je feray ce que feirent Neptune et Apollo en Trois soubs Laomedon.” oc 349–350). The gods Neptune and Apollo had been ordered to construct the walls of the Trojan city. Next, he turns to the hero of the Four sons of Aymon: “I will do […] what Renaud de Montauban did in his last days” (cw 257) (“je feray […] ce que feit Renaud de Montaulban sus ses derniers jours.” oc 350). Renaud had helped to build the walls of the Church of Saint Peter in Cologne. Finally, in a 1552 addition reinforcing the meaning of the preceding examples, he compares himself to Amphion: “Thus did Amphion fund, build, and construct, by playing on his lyre, the great famous city of Thebes” (cw 257) (“Ainsi fonda, bastit, et edifia Amphion sonnant de sa lyre la grande et celebre cité de Thebes.” oc 350). Along with his brother, the poet-musician had built ramparts encircling Thebes. Like Orpheus, Amphion playing the lyre drew the very stones to himself. The narrator, then, proposes to participate in the construction of the wall, helping the masons by playing the bagpipes and supplying them with wine. He will draw from his barrel “a gallant third draft and consecutively a merry fourth, of Pantagruelic sayings” (cw 257–258) (“un guallant tiercin, et consecutivement un joyeulx quart de sentences Pantagruelicques.” oc 350), that is, liquid measures indicating respectively Rabelais’s Third and Fourth Books.13 At the same time, he is concerned about his readers’ reaction to the unexpected nature of his work. Once again, drawing on a short work by Lucian of Samosata titled To One Who Said “You’re a Prometheus in Words,” he borrows

13

Church, its reach is far larger than a simple evocation of historical events, as its interest in the French language illustrates. Véronique Zaercher, Le dialogue rabelaisien: Le Tiers Livre exemplaire (er) 38 (Geneva: 2000), 10–12.

the third book

303

the example of the Bactrian camel and the motley-colored slave, “things not yet seen in Egypt” (cw 258) (“choses non encore veues en Aegypte.” oc 351). In fact, having linked comedy and philosophical dialogue, Lucian said he feared disapproval for this mingling of genres. Rabelais in turn, is concerned that he will annoy his readers, offend and displease them with his “novelties,” the mixture, now in the vernacular, of serious and comic dialogues, a spoudogeloion.14 The passage concerning the barrel reappears in the prologue of the Fifth Book, initially intended as the prologue of the Third Book.15 There Rabelais defines the nature of his participation in the defense of the city. He is bringing his stones to the workshop building the French vernacular.16 Here he places himself explicitly in the throng of “a great flock of Collinets, Marots, Drouets, Saint-Gelais, Salels, Massuaus and a long line of other Gallic poets and prose writers” (cw 612) (“[…] un grand tas de Collinets, Marots, Drouets, Saingelais, Sallets, Masuels, et une longue centurie d’autres poëtes et orateurs Galliques.” oc 726) who have produced, he writes “divine nectar, precious, tasty, sparkling wine, muscatel, delicate, delicious” (cw 612) (“nectar divin, vin precieux, friand, riant, muscadet, délicat, délicieux.” oc 726). They bring “only Parian marble, alabaster, porphyry, and very good royal cement: they treat only heroic exploits, great things, matters arduous, serious, and difficult; all this is silken, crimson rhetoric” (cw 612) (“ils ne portent que marbre Parien, Alebastre, Porphire, et bon ciment Royal, ils ne traittent que gestes heroïques, choses grandes, matieres ardues, graves et difficiles, et le tout en rethorique armoisine, cramoisine […].” oc 726). But then Rabelais is quick to add that he would not be capable of imitating them and aims rather to “warble and whistle like a goose among the swans” (cw 611) (“gasouiller et siffler oye […] entre les Cygnes.” oc 726). Following the royal order of Villers-Cotterêts promulgated in 1539, making French the language of administration in the kingdom of France, and a few 14

15 16

On the hybrid nature of Rabelais’s works, see Duval, “En quoi les œuvres de Rabelais sontelles hybrides?,” in Rabelais et l’ hybridité des récits rabelaisiens, ed. D. Desrosiers (er) 56 (Geneva: 2017), 25–43, as well as Rigolot, “Rabelais and Hybridity,” in Approaches to Teaching Rabelais, eds. T.W. Reeser and F. Gray (New York: 2011), 37–46, and the same author’s “Hybridity, Exemplarity, and Dialogism in a Historical Perspective: Rabelais’s Dialogue on Dialogue with Lucian,” in Der Dialog im Diskursfeld seiner Zeit: Von der Antike bis zur Aufklärung, eds. K.W. Hempfer and A. Traninger (Stuttgart: 2010), 205–217. The satirical dimension cannot be detached from generic hybridity; see Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’ herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007). See Huchon, Rabelais grammairien: De l’ histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité, (er) 16 (Geneva: 1981), 451–456. See Huchon, “Rabelais et le vulgaire illustre,” in La langue de Rabelais et la langue de Montaigne. Actes du Colloque de Rome, septembre 2003, eds. J. Céard and F. Giacone, (er) 48 (Geneva: 2009), 19–39.

304

desrosiers

years before the publication of Du Bellay’s Defense and illustration of the French Language, Rabelais proposes to participate in this battle by means of the Third Book that is, to illustrate in a minor mode, in the humble style, all the possible rhetorical strengths of his “Gallican tongue” (langue Gallique), following the example of Latin and Greek.

∵ Looking at Rabelais’s works in the chronological order of the story they tell, Gargantua, from this point of view, is the first work of the series. At the end of that book, the eponymous hero gives Frère Jean land, the Abbey of Thélème, and a stipend as thanks for his participation in the war against the tyrant Picrochole. In the last chapters of the next book (Pantagruel), after having defeated King Anarche (another tyrant), and conquered Dipsodie, Pantagruel similarly grants the narrator-character Alcofribas Nasier the manor of Salmagundi. However, in the Third Book, there is no sign of Alcofribas, and Pantagruel now bestows that same fiefdom on Panurge. Alcofribas’s disappearance from the Third Book is not explained and his management of Salmagundi not described, maybe to allow the juxtaposition of two opposing kinds of government at the start of the Third Book: the reign of the good governors and the one of the tyrant (who obviously could not be Alcofribas). Whatever the echoes of contemporary conflicts,17 the first chapter opens with praise of the reign of Pantagruel in Dipsodie and voices broad questions concerning human government. This opens the way to a description of the duties of the lord to his new subjects. The narrator offers examples of the beneficent action of good government, evoking the conquests of Osiris, Alexander, Hercules, and Thrasybulus who freed their subjects from monsters and tyrants; he continues this by recalling the equitable government of Octavius Augustus and Numa Pompilius. In this way, he contradicts the belief of those tyrannical minds, claiming to control recently conquered peoples by “plundering, forcing, harassing, ruining the peoples and ruling them with iron rods” (cw 262) (“pillant, forçant, angariant, ruinant, mal vexant, et regissant avecques verges de fer.” oc 354; my italics). In the following chapter, the narrator ironically depicts the “good and prudent” (“bon et prudent”) government of Panurge. In fact, the new lord of Salmagundi thoughtlessly destroys all the goods of his fiefdom and brings ruin to

17

For a historical reading of this first chapter, see the works of Lefranc, “Rabelais et les peuples conquis,” Revue du seizième siècle 2 (1914): 285–288 and of Plattard, “Rabelais et le gouvernement royal,” Revue du seizième siècle 17 (1930): 191–202.

the third book

305

his domain. Using the theory of the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, strength, and temperance) as justification, he maliciously contorts their meaning to justify his debts.18 In any case, despite the moral arguments whose meaning he perverts in his defense, Panurge behaves like a tyrant.19 Moreover, Pantagruel suggests that his justification of these excessive expenditures is heretical. He attributes the idea to Nero and compares Panurge’s behavior to that of Caligula and Albidius. This echoes the comparison that the narrator makes in chapter seven of the Third Book at the moment when he defines the price of the flea Panurge wears in his ear. Panurge, he says, “at such excessive expenditure he grew angry when he was quit, and afterward fed it in the fashion of tyrants and attorneys: on the sweat and blood of his subjects” (cw 277) (“de tant excessive despence se fascha lors qu’il feut quitte, et depuis la nourrit en la façon des tyrans et advocatz, de la sueur et du sang de ses subjectz.” oc 372). Furthermore, when Panurge appears, clothed in a long coarse woolen coat, which, Pantagruel tells, is “an unusual color […] among men of quality and virtue” (cw 278) (“inusitée […] entre gens de bien et de vertus.” oc 372), the good king insists that many people considered that this disguise was “trickery, imposture, and affectation of tyranny over the crude populace” (cw 278) (“piperie, imposture et affectation de tyrannie sus le rude populaire.” oc 372). While his companion, lost in his own inventions, declares that “a divine thing is lending, owing is a heroic virtue” (cw 273) (“chose divine est prester: debvoir est vertus Heroïcque.” oc 367), Pantagruel believes rather that owing, that is, borrowing rather than working, is a vice (oc 368). The cause of Pantagruel’s admonishment is Panurge’s persistent desire to prove that his thesis is well founded. He throws himself into a long sophistic demonstration.20 The commendation of debtors and borrowers that Panurge 18

19 20

Camilla Nilles offers a detailed, nuanced, and extremely enlightening analysis of the symmetrical structures and connections organizing the Praise of Debts in her article “The Economy of Owing: Rabelais’ Praise of Debts,” Études de lettres. Revue de la Faculté des lettres de l’ Université de Lausanne 2 (April–June 1984): 73–88. See also Renner, “Provocation et perplexité: Le double éloge paradoxal des dettes et du langage (Tiers Livre, ii à v),”er 50 (2010): 45–65; Demerson, “L’ éloge panurgien des dettes,” in Humanisme et facétie: Quinze études sur Rabelais (Orléans: 1994), 105–116; Daniel Ménager, “La politique du don dans les derniers chapitres du Gargantua,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8.2 (1978): 179–191; Mayer, “Rabelais’ Satyrical Eulogy: The Praise of Borrowing,” in François Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort. 1553–1953 (Geneva: 1953), 147–155. On the notion of tyranny, see Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois: Paradoxe, scandale et propriété dans le Tiers Livre, (er) 53 (Geneva: 2013), 49–52. Experts on Rabelais are divided over the weight to be given to this speech with respect to the ideas that it supports or undermines. Is it a comic encomium with no serious aims?

306

desrosiers

sets forth conforms perfectly to the rhetoric of paradoxical praise.21 His argument starts by listing the evils that would be present in a world without debts, first broadly considered, where the harmony among the stars, the gods, and the elements of the macrocosm would be disturbed; then, on the level of human communities, whence the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity, would be banished; finally, on the level of the human body, all functions of this microcosm would be stifled. Then, Panurge continues, with a refutation reconsidering on all three levels the happy consequences of a world engaged in lending and borrowing. His praise of debts soon goes beyond purely monetary exchanges and, based now on cosmic harmony, human interactions, and the control over the human body, it ends in the “duty or debt of marriage” (cw 273) (“debvoir de mariage.” oc 367), whereby, in borrowing and debt, the human race is perpetuated. This transition from the government of a fiefdom to the act of procreation opens the way to Panurge’s explanation of his matrimonial aims. Pantagruel’s companion now undertakes a long quest whose aim is to know if he ought to marry, and if he will be a cuckold. Based on domestic ethics,22 the double economic meaning that the words “duty” and “household” take on here, makes this clear. The word debt (“obligation”) is ambiguous, having two meanings: to be obliged to act morally, and to have monetary obligations or debts.23 As for the word household (“mesnage”), in French a synonym of savings, when it first appears, in chapter two of the Third Book, it refers to the management of wealth. Then, Panurge gives it a second meaning by tying it to the relationship,

21

22

23

Or a praise of lending with interest? A satire of Ficino’s Commentary on Platonic love? Or a pure paralogism? Some commentators, we among them, still believe that the final aim of Panurge undermines his defense of debts, without, at the same time, discrediting the ideal he invokes to support his cause. See Greene, “The Unity of the Tiers Livre,” 295–296. On the genre of paradoxical praise in the Third Book, consult Deborah N. Losse, Rhetoric at Play: Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy (Bern: 1980), and Anna Ogino, Les éloges paradoxaux dans le Tiers et le Quart Livre de Rabelais: Enquête sur le comique et le cosmique à la Renaissance (Tokyo: 1989). Ethics, whose central focus is human actions, is traditionally applied to three domains: society, the family, the individual. Seen from the point of view of society, civic ethics, also termed political, examines the place and the role of humans in the conduct of the res publica, their connections with their fellows within the city. It often includes reflections on the best kind of government. On a smaller scale, family or household ethics deals with running a household within the family broadly understood, applied especially to the relations between husband and wife, parents and children, the master and his servants, etc. Finally, individual ethics, morality in the literal sense, teaches man to control himself, ruled by the precepts of “know thyself” (Nosce teipsum). See Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, Rabelais et l’ humanisme civil, (er) 27 (Geneva: 1992). Demerson, “L’ éloge panurgien,” 113.

307

the third book

now fleshly, that he will have with his wife. So, if in spending the household revenues of his fiefdom wastefully, Panurge is revealed to be, regardless of his protestations,24 a flawed household manager, he is doubly so, for confronted with the “duty of marriage” he delays its inception longer than is appropriate. Moreover, he imagines the possibility of marriage only in a context in which newly-wed husbands are exempt from having to go to war. By this means, Panurge would escape from military obligation and abandon his duty as a feudal lord. In fact, when he appears dressed in his odd robes, Panurge, tired of war, tells Pantagruel that he intends to marry: “Farewell arms,” he says, so that, he might “for […] a year at the least, […] draw breath free from the military art” (cw 278–279) (“Cessent les armes,” “[…] un an pour le moins, respirer de l’ art militaire.” oc 373). In this way, Pantagruel’s companion not only escapes his obligations as feudal lord, but also, in hesitating over the question of his marriage, he fails to fulfill the only ethical imperative governing the life of the residents of Thélème: “Do what you will” (cw 126) (“Fay ce que vouldras.” oc 149). In reality, Panurge does not know how to govern his domain or, for that matter, himself.25

∵ Ironically, on the question of his marriage, Panurge, the very man who invited anyone and everyone to consult him on the subject of “household,” does not see fit to gather the fruit of his own deliberations: “Everyone cries: ‘Thrift, thrift!’ but a man or two talks about thrift who knows not what it is. I’m the one whose advice they should take” (cw 265) (“Mais tel parle de mesnaige, qui ne sçayt mie que c’est. C’est de moy que fault conseil prendre.” oc 358). Instead, he turns to Pantagruel and asks his advice (tl ix). Pantagruel’s first answer returns to the two principles joined in the device of the Abbey of Thélème. The accent is on the need to make one’s own choice, and then to act on it. “ ‘Since once,’ said Pantagruel, ‘you’ve cast the die and have thus decreed it and made a firm plan to do 24

25

cw, 278: “O what a great householder I’ll be! After I die they’ll have me burned on an honorific pyre, to get the ashes in memory and model of the perfect householder.”; oc 373: “O le grand mesnaiger que je seray. Après ma mort on me fera brusler en bust honorificque: pour en avoir les cendres en memoire et exemplaire du mesnaiger perfaict.” Gargantua proposes the governance of diverse abbeys to Friar John, which he refuses because, unlike Panurge, he knows himself not to be capable of such a task, cw, 116: “‘For how,’ said he, ‘could I govern others, who cannot possibly govern myself?’”; oc 137: “Car comment (disoit-il) pourroy je gouverner aultruy, qui moy-mesmes gouverner ne sçaurois?” In contrast, Panurge, enveloped in self-love/philautia, lacking self-awareness, does not know who he is.

308

desrosiers

it, there’s nothing more to say about it; all that remains is to put it into execution’” (cw 282) (“Puis (respondit Pantagruel) qu’ une foys en avez jecté le dez, et ainsi l’avez decreté, et prins en ferme deliberation, plus parler n’en fault, reste seulement la mettre à execution.” oc 377). After this, all of Pantagruel’s replies only echo the objections that Panurge makes. The start of each of his sentences repeats the last word or words of each concessive phrase just formulated by Panurge. We see: “I’d rather not marry at all”, followed by “Don’t marry at all, then”; “among the married” by “Then get married”; “that’s a point that has too sharp a point” by “No point in it then, don’t get married” (cw 282) (“j’ aymerois mieulx ne me marier poinct—Poinct doncques ne vous mariez […]”; “entre gens mariez.—Mariez-vous donc […]”; “C’est un poinct qui trop me poingt.— Poinct doncques ne vous mariez.” oc 377; my italics), etc.26 This rhetorical chain foreshadows the advice that will regularly be offered to Panurge, constantly bounced back to his own words. Moreover, all the arguments he invokes are followed by alternating sentences starting with disjunctive expressions: “All right, but”, “But what if” (cw 282) (“voire mais”, “mais si.” oc 377). The very form of this disputatio betrays the oscillation of Panurge’s thought, the endless repetitive quality of his hesitation. It should be noted that Pantagruel does not impose on Panurge a decision that might be foreign to his will. Rather, he limits himself to turning Panurge back to what he has already said. This dialogic construction finally becomes a mise en abyme of multiple useless consultations, first with all plausible informal sources of knowledge: casting Virgilian lots, prophetic dreams, the Sibyl of Panzoust, divination by signs from the deaf Nazdecabre, divination with Her Trippa; then visiting official authorities, representatives of various university faculties: Hippothadée the theologian, Rondibilis the physician, Trouillogan the philosopher, Bridoye the judge. When Panurge failed to get a clear unequivocal response from Pantagruel, the latter proposed that he consult Virgilian verses, without, for all that, any consequent obligation or constraint (tl x): “Now, here’s something you might do if you see fit. Bring me the works of Virgil, and, opening them with your fingernail three times running, we’ll explore, by the verses whose numbers we agree on, the future lot of your marriage” (cw 284) (“Or voyez cy que vous ferez, si bon vous semble. Apportez moy les œuvres de Virgile, et par troys foys avecques l’ongle les ouvrans, explorerons par les vers du nombre entre nous convenu, le sort futur de vostre mariage.” oc 380; my italics). In the list of examples Pantagruel offers on the subject of predictions drawn from consulting the

26

Claude-Gilbert Dubois, “ ‘La chanson de Ricochet’: Fonction de la réitération dans le Tiers Livre de Rabelais,” Cahiers Textuel 15 (1996): 19–32.

the third book

309

works of Homer and Virgil, those named who are given to this kind of divination are all political leaders with the exception of the first, the philosopher Socrates, and the last, Pierre Lamy. Furthermore, the aim of each consultation is to discover the destiny or the future of these political actors. Opilius Macrinus wanted to know if he would secure the imperial crown; Brutus, a military leader, wished to learn the outcome of the battle of Pharsalia; Alexander Severus, if he would someday be emperor of Rome, etc. From his prison, Socrates came by this means to foresee the day of his death; Pierre Lamy, a cellmate of Rabelais, subject to traps from impish spirits, came to know by this means that he would escape. All these examples, taken from André Tiraqueau’s De nobilitate27 except for the case of Lamy, give Panurge’s questions an undeniable ethical flavor. This is the more evident as Panurge imagines his possible marriage—a battle under the banner of Venus—only as a means of escaping his military responsibilities. A hint of the analogy between marriage and war appears as early as chapter six of the Third Book, where the marital act is compared to a combat (cw 276; oc 370). The title of chapter eight, “How the codpiece is the first piece of harness among warriors,” creates an explicit link between conjugal duty and war by means of the male sexual organ. This link also appears in several passages in the Third Book that make use of the ambiguity of the word “braquemard” whose form and function (to strike blows) evokes a phallus (tl, prologue, 347; tl, xxiii, 424), also termed “poniard” (“pistolandier”) in chapter 20 of the Third Book. Generally, in Rabelais’s work, boxing lends itself to equivocation, too. Beyond his matrimonial plans, Panurge asks himself fundamental questions about his participation in war, a problematic that can be seen as a direct continuation of the prologue of the Third Book which is, as we have seen, about the involvement of the philosopher Diogenes at the time of the assault on Corinth, and of the narrator in his activities fortifying and defending his country … and its vernacular through his writings. Following the example of the political leaders mentioned by Pantagruel, the two friends then consult the works of Virgil (tl xii). At the first verse they come upon, Pantagruel warns Panurge that he will share neither Minerva’s bed, “goddess of letters and of war, of counsel and execution” (cw 290) (“Déesse des letres et de guerre: de conseil et execution.” oc 385), nor Jupiter’s table, whom he shows at war. At the second verse, he transposes combat to conjugal relations and tells his friend that his wife will beat him. Finally, he interprets the third verse from the same domestic perspective and notes that Panurge’s wife

27

Charles Perrat, “Autour du juge Bridoye: Rabelais et le De Nobilitate de Tiraqueau,” bhr 16 (1954): 41–57.

310

desrosiers

will steal his property. His predictions indicate that, on every level, Panurge will fail miserably in the conduct of the affairs of his household. For each of these verses, Pantagruel suggests an interpretation that Panurge refutes immediately. These diverse interpretations are not far from the distinct readings that Gargantua and Frère Jean offer of the “Prophetic riddle” (“Enigme en prophetie”) found in the foundation of the Abbey of Thélème in the last chapter of Gargantua. The exegetical query already present in Gargantua’s prologue continues throughout the work of Rabelais, culminating in the Third Book. Faced with these contradictory expositions of the sense of the Virgilian verses, Pantagruel suggests that his friend might try considering dreams (tl xiii–xiv). Panurge agrees, and the next morning, he describes the dream he had the night before. Once again, Pantagruel gives his interpretation and backs it up with the example of the dream of Hecuba, presaging the death of her husband, her children, and the destruction of her country, as well as the dream of Aeneas, predicting the sack of Troy. All the examples he sets forth are in one way or another connected to the ethical dimensions of political or economic life (cw 293–296; oc 395–396). However, Panurge rejects this interpretation which does not resolve his dilemma. Once again, Pantagruel intervenes. Moved by his affection for his friend, thinking only of his good and his profit, he suggests that Panurge consult the Sibyl of Panzoust (tl xvi). To support this advice, he recalls an anecdote concerning none other than Alexander the Great (cw 303–304; oc 400–401). Accompanied by Epistémon, Panurge goes to see the wise woman and, when he returns, presents the king with the verses that the Sibyl wrote on sycamore leaves. Pantagruel sees in them the confirmation of what he had seen in the Virgilian verses and the dream while Panurge gives these prophesies a quite different interpretation (tl xvii–xviii). In the explanation he furnishes for the first couplet, “Husk or shell/she’ll undo” (cw 307) (“T’esgoussera/ de renom,” oc 404), he recalls Pantagruel’s sayings: How many times have I heard you say that the magistracy and the office reveal the man and bring to light what he had in his belly, that then is certainly known what kind of man the person is and what he’s good for when he’s called to the handling of affairs. Before then, when the man is in private, it is not known what kind of man he is, any more than is known of a bean in the husk. cw 308

(Quantes foys vous ay je ouy disant que le magistrat, et l’ office descœuvre l’home, et mect en evidence ce qu’il avoit dedans le jabot? C’ est à dire

the third book

311

que lors on congnoist certainement, quel est le personaige, et combien il vault, quand il est appellé au maniment des affaires. Paravant, sçavoir est estant l’home en son privé, on ne sçait pour certain quel il est, non plus que d’une febve en gousse). oc 405

First of all, if a man’s valor is to be judged by his action, placing these words in the mouth of Panurge is not without irony, given that he manages his domain by losses, escapes his military duty, and keeps on putting off the moment of his marriage. In fact, as he himself declares: “Even as the bean is not seen if it is not shucked, so my virtue and my perfection would never be brought to renown if I were not married” (cw 308) (“Ainsi comme la febve n’est veue se elle ne est esgoussée, aussi ma vertus et ma perfection jamais ne seroit mise en renom, si marié je n’estoys.” oc 405). Secondly, while Pantagruel affirms that a man’s valor is revealed in his handling of public affairs, that is, in his activity within the city, Panurge, for his part, applies this to his sexual activity, thereby once again establishing the link between the question of marriage and the more fundamental issues it englobes. Panurge equally refutes the interpretation of the second couplet, according to which he would be reborn to himself within marriage, that is, taking part in the duties of the commonwealth, he would recover his original nature and, in that way, discover his true self. He reproaches Pantagruel for interpreting the prophecies allegorically and, as far as he is concerned, admits only the literal significance of the third couplet, adding that he would rather know the “sweet fruit of amourettes” (cw 309) (“doulx fruict de amourette.” oc 406) in private, than do the “little thing” (“chosette”) in broad daylight like Diogenes. Let us note here that the expression Panurge uses, “performed in view of the sun, Cynic style” (cw 309) (“faicte en veue du Soleil, à la Cynique.” oc 407) reminds the reader of the very first words of the prologue of the Third Book: “Did you ever see Diogenes, the Cynic philosopher? If you have seen him, you hadn’t lost your sight […] It’s a fine thing to see the brightness of the wine and sun (crowns)” (cw 253) (“veistez vous oncques Diogènes le philosophe Cynic? Si l’ avez veu, vous n’aviez perdu la veue […]. C’est belle chose veoir la clairté du (vin et escuz) Soleil.” oc 345). Panurge dissociates himself from the Greek philosopher, just as he disparages the first sign of Socratic philosophy. Following these diametrically opposed allegorical interpretations,28 it is Pantagruel who once again recommends that Panurge seek advice from a mute.

28

Richard Crescenzo, “Les controverses interprétatives de Pantagruel et Panurge dans le

312

desrosiers

Faced with the hesitation of his companion who is not sure if he should take council from a man or a woman, Pantagruel is again decisive (tl xix): “So take a man; Goatsnose [Nazdecabre] seems to me suitable. He’s deaf and dumb from birth” (cw 313) (“Prenez doncques un home. Nazdecabre me semble idoine. Il est mut et sourd de naissance.” oc 411). Here too, the significance they glean from the mute’s gestures are totally different. So Panurge’s perplexity persists; Pantagruel exclaims (tl xxi): “I never thought […] I’d meet a man as obstinate in his preconceptions as I see you are” (cw 317) (“Je ne pensoys […] jamais rencontrer home tant obstiné à ses apprehensions comme je vous voy.” oc 415). With the intent of dissipating his doubts, Pantagruel suggests that he visit the old poet Raminagrobis. As Edwin M. Duval has clearly shown,29 each consultation has three stages: presentation of the method, exposition of the prophecy, divergent interpretations. Following this pattern, the divination of Nazdecabre closes the first series of four consultations. The encounter with Raminagrobis, whose council echoes the Socratic advice of Pantagruel, opens a second series. Thus, three further consultations are intercalated between the start and finish of this episode, those of Epistémon, Her Trippa, and Frère Jean.

∵ Accompanied by Epistémon and Frère Jean, Panurge goes to the bedside of the dying man, seeking another opinion about his marriage (tl xxi). By way of response, the poet leaves him with verses that, because they support an alternative and still leave him with a choice, seem very unsatisfying to Panurge. Returning to the palace, he gives the king a poem by Raminagrobis whose verdict coincides with Pantagruel’s (tl xxix): I haven’t yet seen a reply that I like better. He means, in sum, that in the undertaking of marriage each man must be the arbiter of his own thoughts and take counsel of himself. Such has always been my opinion, and I told you as much the first time you spoke to me about it. cw 347

(Encores n’ay je veu response, que plus me plaise. Il veult dire sommairement, qu’en l’entreprinse de mariage chascun doibt estre arbitre de ses

29

Tiers Livre: Étude des stratégies rhétoriques et argumentatives,” in Rabelais: À propos du Tiers Livre, eds. J. Dauphiné and P. Mironneau (Biarritz: 1995), 31–43. Duval, “Panurge, Perplexity, and the Ironic Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre,” Renaissance Quarterly 35.3 (Autumn 1982): 381–400.

the third book

313

propres pensées, et de soy mesmes conseil prendre. Telle a tousjours esté mon opinion: et autant vous en diz la premiere foys que m’en parlastez). oc 443–444

The circle will be closed when the priestess Bacbuc offers the explanation of the message of the Divine Bottle/Dive Bouteille in the Fifth Book (cl xlv): “you yourselves be the interpreters of your own undertaking” (cw 710) (“soyez vous mesmes interpretes de vostre entreprinse.” oc 834). Pantagruel agrees with her: “It is not possible […] to say it better than does this venerable pontiff. I said as much to you the first time you spoke to me about it” (cw 710) (“Possible n’est […] mieux dire, que fait ceste venerable pontife: autant vous en di-je lors que premierement m’en parlastes.” oc 834). Meanwhile, on the road back home, Panurge asks Epistémon’s help in solving his dilemma (tl xxiiii): “Old friend and comrade, you see the perplexity of my mind. You know so many good remedies! Could you help me out?” (cw 325) (“Compere mon antique amy, vous voyez la perplexité de mon esprit. Vous sçavez tant de bons remedes. Me sçauriez vous secourir?” oc 424). Just like Pantagruel, Epistémon is astonished by Panurge’s disguise and advises him to put on his usual clothing and then his customary mood. “I’m amazed at you, that you don’t come back to yourself and recall your senses from this wild distraction back to their natural tranquility” (cw 325) (“Je me esbahys de vous, que ne retournez à vous mesmes, et que ne revocquez vos sens de ce farouche esguarement en leur tranquillité naturelle.” oc 425). His words are close to those of Pantagruel. And yet, his stubborn companion refuses to return to his former ways, and insists: “tell me what you think about it: should I marry or not?” (cw 326) (“[…] dictez m’en vostre advis. Me doibz je marier, ou non?” oc 425). Epistémon gives no definitive answer that might solve Panurge’s problem without his taking his own counsel first. Then, for the first time and on his own initiative, Panurge proposes that he and his friend take a journey to one of the four Ogygian Islands to question the oracle of Saturn. He hopes that this will prove a means of reducing the effort of his query, that is, once again by leaving it to someone other than himself. Epistémon replies with a categorical refusal, just as Pantagruel had refused the notion that Panurge’s fate be decided by a toss of the dice (cw 288; tl xi, 385). And, in a firm tone, made firmer still by the use of two imperatives, Epistémon decides the nature of their next consultation (tl xxv): ‘See, however,’ went on Epistémon, ‘what you’ll do around here before we go back to our king, if you’ll be guided by me. Here, near L’Isle-Bouchard, lives Her Trippa: you know how by the arts of astrology, geomancy, chiro-

314

desrosiers

mancy, metopomancy, and others of the same ilk, he predicts all things to come. Let’s confer with him about your affair’. cw 327

(Voyez cy (dist Epistemon continuant) toutesfoys que ferez, avant que retournons vers nostre Roy, si me croyez. Icy prés l’ isle Bouchart demeure Her Trippa, vous sçavez comment par art de Astrologie, Geomantie, Chiromantie, Metopomantie, et aultre de pareille farine il prædict toutes choses futures: conferons de vostre affaire avecques luy). oc 427

With some apprehension, since Her Trippa does not even know that his own wife is deceiving him, Panurge nonetheless accedes to his friend’s wishes. “Very well! Let’s go to him, since that’s how you want it. One cannot possibly learn too much” (cw 327) (“Bien allons vers luy, puys qu’ ainsi le voulez. On ne sçauroit trop apprendre.” oc 427). Here he reformulates the words Pantagruel spoke before the consultation with the Sibyl of Panzoust: “What harm is there in always finding out and always learning?” (cw 303) (“Que nuist sçavoir tousjours, et tous jours aprendre […].” tl, xvi, 400). Here, the predictions of the diviner corroborate the conclusions Pantagruel had arrived at earlier. Moreover, this chapter, situated at the very center of the Third Book, contains the key to the whole episode: “congnois toy” (“know thyself.” cw 329) written in capital letters (oc 428).30 Spoken by Panurge, who accuses Her Trippa of ignoring this Socratic maxim, it manifests his own ignorance at the same time. This new attempt having once again failed, Panurge, as always indecisive and filled with doubts, turns to Frère Jean des Entommeures (tl xxvi–xxviii): “Frère Jean, my friend, I bear you very great reverence, and I was saving you as the best for the last: I beg you, tell me your opinion: should I marry or not?” (cw 336); (“[…] frere Jan mon amy, je te porte reverence bien grande et te reservoys à bonne bouche: je te prie diz moy ton advis. Me doibs je marier ou non?” oc 434). At first, Frère Jean urges him to marry and to accomplish the nuptial act. But if we recall the question underlying Panurge’s possible marriage—will he or will he not stay away from the war?—Frère Jean’s answer is not in the least surprising. He is always the first to want to fight the enemy. In this spirit Frère Jean adds “I’m not advising you to do anything I wouldn’t do in your place. Only be careful and always keep well in mind to link up your scores and keep them 30

It is well worth rereading Duval’s extremely ingenious analysis not only of this episode but of the whole Third Book whose structure he examines in detail in The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 34 (Geneva: 1997), 126.

the third book

315

going” (cw 337) (“je ne te conseille chose que je ne feisse, si j’ estoys en ton lieu. Seulement ayez esguard et consyderation de tous jours bien lier et continuer tes coups.” oc 435). Using this “Venerian” metaphor, he evokes the warring activities of the lord of Salmagundi. Then, keeping to equivocations, he continues, speaking of governing his people: “Therefore, son, keep all those low-born troglodyte common folk in a state of perpetually plowing the soil. See to it that they don’t live like gentlemen, on their incomes, without doing a thing” (cw 337) (“Pourtant fillol maintien tout ce bas et menu populaire Troglodyte, en estat de labouraige sempiternel. Donne ordre qu’ ilz ne vivent en gentilz home: de leurs rentes, sans rien faire.” oc 436). The political dimension of Frère Jean’s words is confirmed by the use of the word “nurse”: “If you ever let up, you’re ruined, you poor guy, and there will happen to you what happens to wet nurses. If they stop giving milk to children, they lose their milk” (cw 337) (“Si tu y fays intermission, tu es perdu paouvret: et t’adviendra ce que advient es nourrisses. Si elles desistent alaicter enfans, elles perdent leur laict.” oc 435–436). Previously in the Third Book the word “nurse” has twice been used in a comparison. As early as chapter one, the narrator turned to it to explain how a king should rule over recently conquered peoples: “Like a newborn child we must nurse them, cradle them, fondle them” (cw 262) (“Comme enfant nouvellement né, les fault alaicter, berser, esjouir.” oc 353). In chapter 13, Pantagruel used it to describe the role of the soul, treated as a nurse, one of whose special functions was to note past and future events (cw 293; oc 388). Panurge accepts what Frère Jean urges, something he believes has been confirmed by the ringing of church bells. However, in a second part of the conversation, Frère Jean raises the possibility that Panurge will be deceived by his wife, if such is his destiny. Faced with such a fate, once again hearing the church bells ring, Panurge draws back. As a consequence, at the end of the second series of consultations, the dilemma remains, and the three companions return to Pantagruel’s palace. In response to this impasse, the king decides to bring together at dinner a theologian, a doctor, a lawyer, and a philosopher, so that he can discuss with all of them the question which has plunged Panurge into such perplexity.31 This banquet, a truly philosophical symposium, is in keeping with all the expectations of the genre:32 1) it is presented as a dialogue; 2) it aims 31 32

Stéphan Geonget, “Rabelais, de la perplexité au ‘Théléma’,” in La notion de perplexité à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2006), 331–433. An explicit reference to Plato’s Timeus (tl 36, 466) confirms this. See Deborah Losse, “The Thematic and Structural Unity in the Symposium of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre,”Romance Notes 16.2 (1975): 390–405.

316

desrosiers

to bring together the obligatory four figures of a symposium; 3) it begins at the moment when the table is cleared; 4) its object is a central question that the participants discuss in turn; 5) it is both comic and serious; 6) it even includes the unexpected arrival of a visitor.

∵ The discussion opens, at the beginning of the second course, with a dialogue between Panurge and Hippothadée. The theologian’s opinion starts the third series of consultations. Father Hippothadée is, in fact, the first to speak. With an “incredible modesty,” as the narrator explains, he first brings a response which the good king has already expressed twice: “My friend, you as advice of us, but first you must advise yourself” (cw 349) (“Mon amy vous nous demandez conseil, mais premier fault que vous mesmes vous conseillez.” oc 446). Like Pantagruel, Raminagrobis and Epistémon, the theologian refers Panurge back to himself. Then he asks questions and, like Frère Jean, finally advises him to marry. Panurge is eager to accept this advice, but the question of his future spouse’s infidelity re-opens the discussion. Hippothadée, however, proposes a means to block this hypothetical adultery. He describes the relations between husband and wife. This part of domestic, economic life is of an eminently ethical nature. It is, he says, a matter of choosing a good wife and of being oneself a “model and exemplar of virtues and decency” (cw 351) (“patron et exemplaire de vertus et honesteté.” oc 448). The image he paints of this ideal wife and her husband recalls that of those residing at the Abbey of Thélème.33 However, Panurge accepts the words of the theologian entirely literally and sees in his descriptions the biblical virtuous woman (Prov 31:10). Since she is dead, Panurge thinks no more of it, thus implicitly allowing him to avoid satisfying the second demand: to be a virtuous example. Unable to quell his fears, Panurge turns to the care of the physician, Rondibilis. Like Epistémon who, faced with this dilemma, felt himself “too inadequate to resolve it” (cw 326) (“par trop insuffisant à la resolution.” oc 425), and like Pantagruel who expressed the same hesitation: “in your propositions there are so many if’s and but’s that I can’t possibly base or resolve anything upon them” (cw 284) (“[…] en vos propositions tant y a de Si, et de Mais, que je n’y sçaurois rien fonder ne rien resouldre.” oc 379), the physician starts by acknowledging his own ignorance: “‘By the ambles of my mule!’ replied Rondibilis, ‘I don’t know what I should reply to this problem’ ” (cw 351) (“Par les ambles de

33

G, lvii, 149; cw, 126.

the third book

317

mon mulet (respondit Rondibilis) je ne sçay que je doibve respondre à ce probleme.” oc 448). Then, like his colleague Hippothadée, Rondibilis interrogates Panurge and, at the end, recommends that he should marry, a notion that the latter readily accepts, yet still without forgetting his concerns about the fidelity of his wife. Now, Rondibilis turns adultery into a corollary of marriage, warning his interlocutor about female inconstancy.34 However, like Frère Jean and Hippothadée, he suggests a remedy for being a cuckold, without successfully reassuring Panurge. Following the discussions with the theologian and the physician, Pantagruel finally turns to the philosopher Trouillogan, and puts to him in his turn the thorny question: “Should Panurge marry or not?” (cw 362) (“Panurge se doibt il marier, ou non?” oc 461). His first answer is nothing if not paradoxical: “Both” (“Tous les deux”). This startles Panurge, causing him to repeat the question. Now the philosopher answers: “Neither one” (“Ne l’ un ne l’ aultre”). The interpretation Pantagruel offers of the philosopher’s answers tends in the same direction as the remedy for cuckoldry suggested by Rondibilis. He recounts a fable in which the god Cuckold pours his “favors” upon those who would “stop all business, neglect their own affairs to spy on their wives, lock them up and mistreat them out of Jealousy” (cw 329; my italics) (“[…] cesseroient de toute negociation, mettroient leurs affaires propres en non chaloir, pour espier leurs femmes, les reserrer et mal traicter par Jalousie.” oc 456). Pantagruel, too, insists that the civil duties of a person continue, even if he is married: [H]aving a wife is having her for such use as Nature created her for, which is for the aid, pleasure, and society of man; not having a wife is not getting slack by hanging about her, not contaminating for her sake that unique and supreme affection that man naturally owes to God, not giving up the duties he naturally owes to his country, the commonwealth, his friends, not disregarding his studies and business to be continually making up to his wife (my italics). cw 364

([…] femme avoir, est l’avoir à usaige tel que nature la créa, qui est pour l’ayde, esbatement, et societé de l’home: n’avoir femme, est ne soy apoiltronner autour d’elle: pour elle ne contaminer celle unicque et supreme 34

Some commentators, failing to separate the views of Rondibilis the character and those of the author Rabelais, attribute to the latter the fictional doctor’s misogyny. On this subject see Christine Arsenault, Les “Singes de Rabelais”: La transfictionnalité et postérité littéraire de l’ œuvre rabelaisienne (1532–1619), PhD thesis (Rimouski-Paris: 2015).

318

desrosiers

affection que doibt l’home à Dieu: ne laisser les offices qu’il doibt naturellement à sa patrie, à la Republicque, à ses amys, ne mettre en non chaloir ses estudes et negoces, pour continuellement à sa femme complaire). oc 463

In Panurge’s case, these views, tending in the same ethical direction, are shown to be all the more pertinent in view of the fact that the lord of Salmagundi, let us recall, wishes to marry in order to escape participation in the war. Moreover, Trouillogan’s two answers, neither of which Panurge understands, correspond to the philosopher’s own situation. In fact, when Panurge asks him: “Are you married or not?” (cw 366) (“Estez vous marié ou non?” oc 465), Trouillogan gives him the same response: “Neither one, and both at the same time” (cw 367) (“Ne l’un ne l’aultre, et tous les deux ensemble.” oc 465).35 And yet, Panurge is deaf to these explanations, ceaselessly repeating his question: “But advise me, I beseech you: what should I do?” (cw 365) (“Mais conseillez moy, de grace. Que doibs je faire?” oc 464). The philosopher Trouillogan, in his turn repeats the maxim of Thélème: “What you will” (“Ce que vouldrez”). Like Pantagruel and the others, he refers him to his own will and to putting it into action. Panurge, however, refuses to take the rudder of his own ship and continues to turn to a third party: “I don’t want a thing except what you’ll advise me. What do you advise me about this?” “Nothing” answers the philosopher (cw 365) (“Je ne veulx sinon ce que me conseillerez. Que m’en conseillez vous?” “Rien.” oc 464). As we see, Trouillogan does not tell Panurge what to do. He does not impose external knowledge that would free him from the need to explore his own intentions, allow him to avoid questioning himself, keep him from confronting himself. The discussion with the philosopher Trouillogan, the last before the consultation with the fool that will turn out to be decisive, becomes in a way a sort of fusion of all the responses Panurge has heard up to this point. At the conclusion of all these consultations, Panurge is no more certain of what to do; at every turn he has been sent to consider himself … And so it will remain until the end of the Third Book.

∵ Seeing the perplexity in which Panurge continues to find himself, Pantagruel, as a last resort, suggests that he consult a fool. He justifies this choice with 35

Renner, “ ‘Ni l’ un ni l’ autre et tous les deux à la fois’: Le paradoxe ménippéen inversé dans le Tiers Livre de Rabelais,”Romanic Review 97.2 (2006): 153–167; George Hoffmann, “Neither one nor the other and both together,” er 25 (1991): 79–90.

the third book

319

these words: “By the advice, counsel, and prediction of fools, you know how many princes, kings, and commonwealths have been preserved, how many battles won, how many perplexities solved” (cw 369) (“Par l’ advis, conseil, et prædiction des folz vous sçavez quants princes, roys, et republicques ont esté conservez, quantes batailles guaignées, quantes perplexitez dissolues.” oc 468). This explanation clearly indicates the real question at the heart of Panurge’s inquiry. Furthermore, among the epithets attached to the fool Triboullet,36 those which Pantagruel applies to him are conspicuously associated with administrative and political functions while Panurge’s choice of qualifiers are concerned, among other things, with duties of the pontifical chancellery.37 The meeting takes place, after the trial of Judge Bridoye, in the presence of the king, his companions, and domestics.38 Pantagruel interprets the gestures and words of Triboullet in conformity with his earlier readings of oracles and divinatory responses. Obstinately maintaining his position, Panurge embraces the opposite of these meanings. In any case, he adds an element to them that Pantagruel had not considered. Triboullet having given Pantagruel’s companion an empty bottle, Panurge for the first time decides alone and on his own responsibility to embark on an action that will take place: to obtain the word of the Divine Bottle. I swear to you by the backbone of Saint Fiacre in Brie that our morosophe, the unique but not lunatic Triboullet, is sending me back to the bottle. And once more I refresh my first vow, and swear by Styx and Acheron, in your presence, to wear spectacles on my bonnet and wear no codpiece on my breeches until I have got the Divine Bottle’s word about my project. cw 396

36

37 38

In the composition in concentric circles exposed by Duval, the consultation of the fool Triboullet corresponds symmetrically to that of the wise Pantagruel, see Duval, “Panurge, Perplexity,” 388. Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais, 171. The episode of Judge Bridoye, who decides the outcome of a case by rolling the dice, is attached to chapter eleven of the Third Book, the chapter which shows Panurge hoping to game his future by tossing dice. When Pantagruel uses the expression “alea jacta est,” cw, 282: “Since once […] you’ve cast the die […]”; oc 377: “Puis […] qu’une foys en avez jecté le dez […],” he means it figuratively. See Renner, “Alea iacta judiciorum est: Legal Satire and the Problem of Interpretation in Rabelais,” Comitatus 35 (2004): 83–107; Duval, “The Judge Bridoye, Pantagruelism, and the Unity of Rabelais’ Tiers Livre,” er 17 (1983): 37–60; and Geonget, “Bridoye, le ‘débile’ illuminé,” in La notion de perplexité, 101–110. Judge Bridoye being on trial, he is not consulted regarding Panurge’s matrimonial dilemma.

320

desrosiers

(Je vous jure l’espine de sainct Fiacre en Brye, que nostre Morosophe l’unicque non Lunaticque Triboullet me remect à la Bouteille. Et je refraischiz de nouveau mon veu premier, et jure Stix et Acheron en vostre præsence, lunettes au bonnet porter, ne porter braguette à mes chausses, que sus mon entreprinse je n’aye eu le mot de la Dive Bouteille). oc 494

We should note that this, Panurge’s first and only resolution, takes place after he has agreed with Pantagruel to recognize his folly. Reluctantly he admits as much: “Not that I mean to exempt myself shamelessly from the domain of folly. I’m its vassal and belong to it, I confess. Everyone is mad. […] And a crazy fool would I be if, being a fool, a fool I did not think myself” (cw 395) (“Non que je me vueille impudentement exempter du territoire de follie. J’ en tiens et en suys, je le confesse. Tout le monde est fol. […] Et fol enragé serois, si fol estant, fol ne me reputois.” oc 493). This initial decision, which Panurge will put into action in the Fourth Book, closes the series of consultations begun in chapter nine of the Third Book.

∵ Several constants emerge from this inquiry. First, unlike his close companions, Pantagruel, Epistémon, and Frère Jean, whom Panurge consults on his own, the other consultations can all be traced to the initiative of a third person. It is Epistémon, for example, who decides to visit Her Trippa. Pantagruel suggests that Panurge try reading his fate from Virgilian verses, dreams, the oracle of the Sibyl of Panzoust, the mute Nazdecabre, the poet Raminagrobis, and the fool Triboullet. And it is he again who brings together the learned men to confer with them. Aside from the plan to leave on an expedition to find the Divine Bottle, the only time Panurge suggests consulting an oracle, the oracle of Saturn in the Ogygian Isles, nothing comes of it. Epistémon gives his request the back of his hand: “‘That,’ replied Epistémon, ‘is too evident an imposture and too fabulous a fable. I won’t go’” (cw 327) (“C’est (respondit Epistemon) abus trop evident, et fable trop fabuleuse. Je ne iray pas.” oc 427). Using the same arguments, Pantagruel also turns down Panurge’s few suggestions. When the former imagines, for example, using dice to discover the fate of his marriage, Pantagruel retorts that this “kind of divination is deceitful, illicit, and extremely scandalous. Don’t ever trust it” (cw 288) (“Ce sort est abusif, illicite, et grandement scandaleux. Jamais ne vous y fiez.” oc 383). When Panurge suggests putting a few laurel twigs in his pillow, he dissuades him: “That’s a superstitious thing, and there’s nothing but misconceptions in what is written about it by Ser-

the third book

321

apion Ascalonites, Antiphon, Philochorus, Artemon, and Fulgentius Planciade” (cw 296) (“C’est chose superstitieuse: et n’est que abus ce qu’ en ont escript Serapion Ascalonites, Antiphon, Philochorus, Artemon, et Fulgentius Planciades.” oc 392). So far, Panurge neither decides nor accomplishes anything based on his own thoughts. The others speak for him and, when they finally urge him to follow the maxim of Thélème, Panurge refuses. With the exception of the decision he takes at the end of the Third Book, Panurge is constantly in violation of the only injunction prescribed for the inhabitants of Thélème: “Do what you will.” There is a second constant to emerge from this series of consultations. On the level of interpretative content, Pantagruel and Panurge offer readings of the various predictions which are at once diametrically opposed and equally plausible. In fact, even though Panurge’s interpretation always contradicts that of his lord, he does not find the latter’s more credible than his own. And for good reason. Otherwise, he would be obliged to choose, and as a consequence, to act. It should be noted that, just like Panurge, the reader is confronted with these contradictory interpretations without any definitive resolution emerging from within the text. Although Panurge usually leans toward literal interpretations, no narrative force emerges that might indicate the best interpretation. Therefore, the reader is not held to a position in favor of one or the other stance. The final resolution of the dilemma is left to the discretion of the interpreter, who, like Panurge, is referred to himself and his own judgement.39 In the last chapters of the Third Book Panurge finally decides to take to the sea to get the word from the Divine Bottle. Having been granted paternal permission, Pantagruel agrees to accompany Panurge and embarks with his companions on the Thalamège to undertake this voyage. The matrimonial question at the heart of the Third Book resurfaces with the unannounced arrival of Gargantua, missing since his son Pantagruel had learned that he had been transported to Fairyland (cw 209; P, xxiii, 298). In contrast to Panurge who hesitates and constantly puts off any decision to marry, Pantagruel immediately acquiesces to the wish and desire of his father and leaves the marriage preparations up to him. Gargantua’s long speech on this subject is oriented to a critique of the law permitting children to marry

39

These contradictory interpretations echo the divergent readings of the “Prophetic Riddle” proposed by Gargantua and Frère Jean at the end of Gargantua, the central questioning of the Prologue to Gargantua, and the central issue of language and its meanings throughout Rabelais’s work.

322

desrosiers

without parental authorization.40 In the 1552 edition41 it is immediately followed by four chapters in praise of the Pantagruelion.42 This final encomium corresponds to the praise of debts at the start of the Third Book. In the same way, examining the law allowing clandestine marriages echoes the discussion concerning the law exempting newlyweds from going to war. In fact, as Guy Demerson and Edwin M. Duval have shown,43 the Third Book as a whole is composed of concentric circles. Praise of Debts (ii–v) Marriage and Law: military exemption (vi) Pantagruel (ix) Sortes Virgilianæ (x–xii) Dream (xiii–xv) Sibyl (xvi–xviii) Nazdecabre (xix–xx) Raminagrobis (xxi–xxiii) Epistémon (xxiv) Her Trippa (xxv) Frère Jean (xxvi–xxviii) Raminagrobis (xxix) Hippothadée (xxx) Rondibilis (xxxi–xxxiv) Trouillogan (xxxv–xxxvi) Bridoye (xxxixxliv) Triboullet (xlv–xlvi)

40 41 42

43

Plattard, “L’invective de Gargantua contre les mariages contractés ‘sans le sceu et adveu’ des parents (Tiers Livre, chap. 48),” Revue du seizième siècle 14 (1927): 381–388. Only two chapters at the end of the 1546 edition are devoted to praising the Pantagruelion. Verdun-Louis Saulnier summarizes his predecessors’ various interpretations of the Pantagruelion in his article “L’énigme du Pantagruélion, ou du Tiers au Quart,” er 1 (1956): 48–72. He himself sees the Pantagruelion as an expression of hesuchism, that is evangelism in a time of repression, when silence or mere hints of the intended meaning are required. See also Demonet, “Polysémie et pharmacie dans le Tiers Livre,” in Rabelais et le Tiers Livre, ed. E. Kotler (Nice: 1996), 61–84; Louis-Georges Tin, “Qu’est-ce que le Pantagruelion?,” er 39 (2000): 125–135, and the same author’s “Le Pantagruelion: Réflexions sur la notion d’ exégèse littéraire,” in Rabelais et la question du sens. Actes du colloque international de Cerisy-La-Salle, août 2000, eds. J. Céard, M.-L. Demonet, and S. Geonget (er) 49 (Geneva: 2011), 113–124. Demerson, François Rabelais (Paris: 1991), and Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre. In his article “Dynamique de la déraison: La symétrie faussée du Tiers Livre du Pantagruel,” Europe 757 (1992): 6–20, André Tournon examines Duval’s model and finds structural discordances in it.

the third book

323

Marriage and Law: clandestine marriages (xlviii) Praise of Pantagruelion (xlix–lii) Not only does the Third Book thus present a particularly carefully constructed literary architecture, but the workings of a multiplicity of literary forms can be discerned within it, just the kind of diversity and generic complexity announced by the prologue. Beyond the paradoxical praise of debts and of the Pantagruelion, which are rooted in epideictic rhetoric,44 other encomiastic sections couple praise and blame, as found in text books teaching declamation:45 for example, the blason and counter-blason of the ballock which surround Frère Jean’s consultation in chapters 26 and 28,46 the praise of the codpiece Panurge celebrates in chapter 8, and his invective against devils in chapter 23; the blasons of the fool, Triboullet, in chapter 38, etc. Other genres considered in treatises of progymnasmata are also present in the Third Book: fables,47 anecdotes,48 maxims, critique of a law. In this sense, the proverb, “the wise learn from fools” is exemplified by the tale of the meat-roaster’s smoke in chapter 37. There is also the tale of Hans Carvel’s ring in chapter 28 or the controversy surrounding the mother who murdered her husband in chapter 44. Beyond this, there is the problematic of marriage which continues through the whole of the Third Book: “Should Panurge marry?” might be the model found in treatises of progymnasmata to illustrate one of the most complex and paradoxical oratorical exercises, that is, the declamation.49 This collection of examples of 44 45

46

47

48 49

The epideictic (also known as the encomiastic or demonstrative) along with the deliberative (political) and judicial, constitute the three genres of rhetorical discourse. These treatises on written composition, known as progymnasmata were widely used in the 16th century. The version of Aphthonius of Antioch, a late 4th-century a.d. rhetor, included fourteen kinds of composition of increasing difficulty, from the fable to critique of a law, going through praise, blame, description, etc. Chrestien Wechel, the publisher of Rabelais’s 1546 Third Book also published many editions of Aphthonius’ textbook. See Desrosiers, “Le Tiers Livre de Rabelais et la tradition des progymnasmata,” in Inextinguible Rabelais (Paris: 2021), 305–315. In his Art poétique français in Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance, ed. F. Goyet (Paris: 1990), 131, Thomas Sébillet defines the blason as “a continuous praise or unbroken vituperation of the subject being blazoned. For this purpose, those who wish to write them will do well to consider the demonstrations written by Greek and Latin rhetors.” See Pouey-Mounou, “Chapitre iv: Épithètes et blasons: La ‘compétence’ en question,” in Panurge comme lard en pois, 257–345. Paul J. Smith, “Fable ésopique et dispositio épidictique: Pour une approche rhétorique du Pantagruel,” in Rabelais pour le xxie siècle. Actes du Colloque du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Chinon-Tours, 1994, ed. M. Simonin (er) 33 (Geneva: 1998), 91–104. Monique Léonard, “Anecdotes, exemples et récits secondaires dans le Tiers Livre,” in Rabelais: À propos du Tiers Livre, eds. J. Dauphiné and P. Mironneau (Biarritz: 1995), 71–91. Panurge’s consultations are at the same time declamations; this genre, expounding on “a

324

desrosiers

eloquence in the vulgar tongue bears witness not only to Rabelais’s humanist training, skilled in the arts of discourse in Latin and Greek, but equally of his desire to have an active role in promoting the French language,50 at a time when linguistic discussions were increasingly frequent.51 Translated by Marian Rothstein

50 51

fictional subject by examining its pros and cons with an eye to exercising one’s eloquence” invites each writer to form a personal judgement. That is Erasmus’s definition of declamation: Erasmus, “Appendix descriptive Jodie Clithovei,” in Opera omnia, vol. 10, ed. J. Leclerc (Hildesheim: 1962), 812 ff. See Jean-Charles Monferran, “Rabelais Le Tiers Livre: Approches stylistiques et rhétoriques du chapitre ix,” L’ information grammaticale 68 (1996): 6–10. Huchon, “Rabelais et les genres d’ escrire,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 226–247. Demonet, Les voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris: 1992).

chapter 13

Interpreting the Quart Livre Paul J. Smith

The Tiers Livre (1545) ends with the announcement of a sequel: the navigation of Panurge and Pantagruel in search of the Oracle of the Dive Bouteille, which should give a decisive answer to the question of whether or not Panurge should marry. The reader should, however, be very patient. In 1548 a partial version of the Quart Livre appeared in Lyon without a publisher’s name and under unknown circumstances (but probably without Rabelais’s permission). This version contains 10 chapters, which abruptly and mysteriously end after the storm episode, with a concluding juridical formula: “Vray est quia plus n’en dict” (oc 1533, variant; cw 884, note: True it is that he/she says no more about it). This edition is preceded by a prologue, which today is often referred to as the “Ancien Prologue.” The final version of the Quart Livre would only appear in 1552, and it is the longest and certainly Rabelais’s least accessible book. This edition, printed in Paris by Michel Fezandat, enlarges the original 10 chapters to 18 chapters, and continues after the storm episode with another 49 new chapters, to make a total of 67 chapters. The book is preceded by a royal privilege, a dedication to Cardinal Odet de Chatillon, and an extensive, all-new prologue, which replaces the much shorter 1548 one. To a few copies an anonymous glossary was added, the so-called Briefve Declaration. Unlike Rabelais’s other books, the 1552 Quart Livre was not revised by its author, for Rabelais died in 1553.

1

Synopsis

The Quart Livre is the story of a sea quest, told by a homodiegetic narrator, a minor, nameless character—only once is he addressed by one of his companions, Panurge: “monsieur l’abstracteur mon amy, mon Achates” (ql 20, 588; cw 483).1 His main function is to witness the journey in which he partakes. The narrative is structured around a cluster of themes known from a long tradition of 1 This means that he is Alcofrybas Nasier, the homodiegetic narrator and very present character in Pantagruel who disappears in Gargantua, and is invisible in the Tiers Livre, both as narrator and character.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_015

326

smith

both authentic and imaginary sea travel narratives. In the Quart Livre we find five traditional episodes: the departure, the meeting with compatriots in foreign lands, the storm at sea, the calm at sea, and the menacing sea monster. There is also a less traditional theme, namely the episode of the frozen words. The main part of the book is given to 14 islands, which are populated by allegorical, mostly satirical creatures. A total of 19 episodes can be distinguished, irregularly distributed over the 67 chapters. This can be visualized schematically as follows:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Episode

Chapters

Departure Medamothi [Greek: Nowhere] Dindenault (encounter with compatriots) Ennasin [lacking nostrils] Cheli [Hebrew: Peace] Procuration with the Chiquanous [process servers] Thohu and Bohu [Hebrew: Formless and Empty] with Bringuenarilles Storm Island of the Macraeons [Greek: the Long-Lived] Tapinois [in secret] with Quaresmeprenant [Lent observer] Sea monster Farouche [Wild Island] with the Andouilles [Chitterlings] Ruach [Greek: Wind] Papefigues [Pope-Figs] Papimanes [Papimaniacs] Frozen words Gaster [Latin: Belly] Chaneph [Hebrew: Hypocrisy]—Calm at sea Ganabin [Hebrew: Robbers]

1 2–4 5–8 9 10–11 12–16 17

Island Island Island Island Island

Island Island Island Island Island Island Island Island Island

18–24 25–28 29–32 33–34 35–42 43–44 45–47 48–54 55–56 57–62 63–65 66–67

The following is a brief summary based on this scheme, in which attention is given to the function of the episodes in the story. The episode of the departure (1) describes how Pantagruel and his companions—Panurge, frère Jean, Epistemon, and the others—bid farewell to Gargantua. The Pantagruelists depart with a fleet of 12 ships, all described in the first chapter, but for most of the book attention is given solely to Pantagruel’s main ship, the Thalamege—to

interpreting the quart livre

327

the point of forgetting the other ships. They reach the island of Medamothi (2). Its name, meaning “Nowhere,” indicates that from this moment on the characters are entering an imaginary world. However, their ties with the homeland are still not entirely severed: Pantagruel receives a letter from his father, brought by a messenger; he answers by means of a carrier pigeon, and he sends the messenger back with precious gifts for his father, including a tarandus, a wondrous color-changing animal, and three young unicorns, bought at the market of Medamothi. The next episode (3) also revisits links to the homeland: the Pantagruelists encounter some travelling compatriots, including Dindenault, a sheep merchant who tries to scam Panurge. Panurge takes revenge by drowning the merchant and his sheep. From this episode on there is no contact with the homeland. The travelers moor at islands inhabited by allegorical creatures that are reminiscent of the monstrous characters in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, and whose exact meanings, like those of Bosch’s creatures, mostly remain obscure. The island Ennasin (4) is inhabited by “mal plaisans Allanciers” (oc 560; cw 458), creatures that are not interrelated through normal familial bonds (parents, children, husband, wife, etc.), but are instead connected by mere (often obscene) wordplay. On the next island, Cheli (5), the Pantagruelists are welcomed by the exuberant but empty greetings of King Panigon and his court. The travelers, especially frère Jean, are eager to withdraw from this unpleasant company by entering into the king’s kitchen and amusing themselves with menuz propos, table talk, on the question of why monks love kitchens. This occurs frequently in the book: often the Pantagruelists’ table talk is more important than their visit to the island, their visit being no more than a pretext for their menuz propos. This certainly applies to their visit to the island of Procuration (6), where the inhabitants, the Chiquanous, earn their living by being beaten—a satire on process servers, who are paid for the beatings they receive. This strange way of life causes the companions to amuse themselves by telling a series of anecdotes which for five whole chapters are intertwined with a complex narrative structure of embedment. On the next visit, to the islands of Thohu and Bohu (7), they hear the story of the strange death of the giant Bringuenarilles, who died from eating a pat of butter. Then the travelers face a storm at sea (8). In this episode the main characters are once again characterized: the comically frightened and superstitious Panurge; the brave but rash and rampant frère Jean; and the pious, steadfast, and decisive Pantagruel. The storm dies down, and the company lands on the island of the Macraeons (9), where they learn that the storm was caused by the death of one of the demigods of the island. On the next island, Tapinois (10), the companions do not moor, because the land is inhabited by the dangerous giant Quaresmeprenant. Although the travel companions do not get to see the giant, Epistemon “anatomizes” Quares-

328

smith

meprenant in long lists that fill four chapters. Then a physeter, a whale-like sea monster, attacks the ships (11) and is heroically defeated by Pantagruel. Subsequently, the travelers arrive on the island of Farouche (12), where they are attacked by the Andouilles. The reason for the attack is that the Andouilles have mistaken Pantagruel for their archenemy Quaresmeprenant. The Andouilles are defeated by Pantagruel’s kitchen chefs, under the command of frère Jean. After the battle is won, the Andouilles’ god appears: it is a flying pig that poops mustard, which brings the fallen Andouilles back to life. The next island is Ruach (13), inhabited by wind-eaters. The following two islands are antithetical: the desolate island of the Papefigues (14), whose inhabitants are punished because they once made an obscene gesture (“faire la figue”) at the pope, and the prosperous island of the Papimanes (15), the pope-worshippers. In the middle of the sea the travelers encounter a strange natural phenomenon: they hear noises caused by frozen words (16), which produce sounds while thawing. The next island is again allegorical in nature: it is the residence of the driving force in the world, Messer Gaster (17). A large part of this episode is devoted to a paradoxical eulogy of the Belly, whose omnipotence the narrator demonstrates and praises. Arriving on the island of Chaneph (18), at which they do not moor, the company gets stuck in a patch of calm. Boredom strikes, but it is broken by the Pantagruelists’ festive banquet and joyeux propos, which “by occult sympathy of Nature” make the favorable wind blow again, which leads the company to Ganabin (19). The threat of this island requires the Pantagruelists to fire gunshots as a warning. Panurge gets scared, flees below deck, and shits himself from fear. The book ends with Panurge’s reappearance on deck and his joyful praise of the healing power of his excrement. From this brief and necessarily superficial synoptical reading it is clear that all the episodes have multiple semantic layers and a high density of information, both of which make the Quart Livre, despite all the scholarly comments, Rabelais’s most difficult book. Who or what exactly is meant with, for example, the Ennasin, King Panigon, the Ruachites, and the islands of Chaneph or Ganabin, continues to remain open for scholarly discussion.

2

Narrative Structure and Coherence

One of the questions addressed by Rabelaisian criticism concerns the structure of the book. Is it a loose collection of episodes fitted together by linear linking, without a real structure, and with an arbitrary ending? This was the predominant opinion within Rabelais scholarship until the 1980s. Today, one is more inclined to see the book as a “parole en archipel” (the term, inspired by

interpreting the quart livre

329

the poet René Char, was coined by Frank Lestringant),2 i.e., a series of apparently loose episodes that are nevertheless interconnected beneath the surface, submarinely, as it were. We note first of all that the book contains a certain coherence, because some episodes are linked explicitly or implicitly to other episodes. That applies, obviously, to the antithetic episodes of the Papefigues (14) and the Papimanes (16), and also to Quaresmeprenant (10) and the Andouilles (12), who in their enmity symbolize the Battle of Carnival and Lent. Quaresmeprenant is a fisheater, and the Andouilles symbolize the fat kitchen of Carnival. In this perspective, the sea monster (11) is the trait-d’union between the two episodes. As a whale the monster is neither meat nor fish, and is thereby affiliated with Quaresmeprenant, and the Andouilles as well, whom it resembles with its elongated shape. Another oppositional pair is formed by the episodes of the storm and the calm. These episodes are stylistically opposed: the tempest is, as it were, displayed in the shouting of the main characters—frère Jean’s curses, and Panurge’s lamentations. This contrasts with the monotonous repetition of syntactically identical sentences, which not only describe but also reflect the boredom of the Pantagruelists. Thematically, these two episodes are part of the wind theme in the book: the wind plays a major role in the person of Bringuenarilles (6), who devours windmills, and the wind-eating inhabitants of Ruach (13). Also important is the continual reference to the golden mean between storm and calm, namely the favorable wind, which ensures the progress of the quest. This favorable wind is connected to the joyful table talk of the Pantagruelists, as is evident through the stylistic figure of the zeugma: “Continuant le bon vent, et ces joyeulx propous” (ql 66, 695; cw 587). Another theme that unites a number of episodes and is affiliated with the wind theme throughout the book, is eating, which is portrayed both negatively and positively—negatively in the case of the eating customs of Bringuenarilles and the Ruachites, and positively in the case of the characters’ continuous table talk, connected to the festive banquets on board: “En pleine mer nous banquetans, grignotans, divisans, et faisans beaulx et cours discours” (ql 55, 667; cw 556). Banquets are among the more positive effects of Messer Gaster’s blind force. There are other examples of coherence. Some episodes form a thematic sequence: episodes (1), (2), and (3) recount the progressive removal of the travelers from their homeland; episodes (4), (5), and (6) construct a set of islands 2 Frank Lestringant, “L’ insulaire de Rabelais, ou la fiction en archipel,” in Rabelais en son demimillénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin (er) 21 (1988), 249–274.

330

smith

with strange but harmless creatures. On the other hand, episodes (18) and (19) are about islands populated with hostile creatures: the travel companions dare not moor upon them. Episode (9) is linked to (8) because it retrospectively gives an explanation for the storm. Another device ensuring the coherence of the book is the use of many prolepses (narrative anticipations) and analepses (back-references) made by the narrator or the characters to other episodes, or to the purpose of the quest. Examples of prolepses are the Pantagruelists’ joyful anticipation of their visit to the Lanternes (ql 5, 548; cw 447), Xenomanes anticipating their encounter with the Andouilles (ql 29, 607; cw 499), or Pantagruel summarizing their ultimate goal: “Une seule cause les avoit en mer mis, sçavoir est studieux desir de veoir, apprendre, congnoistre, visiter l’oracle de Bacbuc, et avoir le mot de la Bouteille, sus quelques difficultez proposes par quelqu’ un de la compaignie” (ql 25, 598; cw 492). Examples of analepses are the frightened Panurge, who cries to the approaching sea monster to go to the Chiquanous (ql 33, 617; cw 509), or Pantagruel acquiescing to the Ruachites by informing them that their enemy Bringuenarilles is dead (ql 44, 642; cw 533).3 On the perspective of anticipation one sentence in the first chapter is very important, because it assures the reader of a happy ending: the voyage will be “sans naufrage, sans perte de leurs gens, en grande serenité (exceptez un jour prés l’ isle des Macreons)” (ql 1, 539–540; cw 439). Of all the Rabelais scholars, Edwin Duval is the one who goes furthest in arguing the book’s coherence. According to Duval the islands that the Pantagruelists visit are a series of increasingly false utopias that are contrary to the ideal of caritas preached by Paul, who aimed at a peaceful coexistence of the opposing positions within the mystical body of the Church. From this point of view, the last three episodes are linked. Duval considers Ganabin to constitute the final step in a series of three islands “that contain increasingly sinister forms of anticaritas: diabolical ingenuity (Gaster), sanctimonious hypocrisy (Chaneph), and predatory force against the defenceless (Ganabin).”4 From this perspective, the last three islands place themselves in a general trend of increasing anticaritas: From the deficient, defective, or false caritas of Ennasin, Cheli, and Procuration, the Quart Livre traces a steady decline through the carnal legalism 3 For a full survey of internal and external prolepses and analepses, see Paul J. Smith, Voyage et écriture: Étude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais, (er) 19 (Geneva: 1987), 136, note 34. 4 Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 36 (Geneva: 1998), 78.

interpreting the quart livre

331

of Tapinois and Farouche and the “puffed up” vanity of the Ruchians, to the intolerant and unforgiving odium of the Papefigues and Papimanes, to conclude with the undisguised philautia and active anticaritas of messere Gaster, Chaneph, and Ganabin.5 Therefore, the quest for the Pantagruelists has no issue: “for the true telos we must look not beyond the Quart Livre but once again, as in the case of the Tiers Livre, within it,”6 and turn to the center of the book. According to Duval this centre is chapter 34 (33 chapters precede it and 33 follow it: a highly symbolic number). This chapter tells of Pantagruel’s victory over the sea monster, explicitly named “Diable Sathanas.” The heroic feat of the giant is interpreted by Duval as the triumph over the Devil, the epitome of all forms of anti-caritas met on their way. It actually summarizes the tireless struggle of Pantagruel, the personification of Paulinian caritas, against these forces, in brokering peace between enemies.

3

The 1552 Prologue: Mediocritas and Pantagruelism

Like Rabelais’s other books, the Quart Livre is embedded in paratexts which should position Rabelais’s work and provide guidance to the reader. Apparently, Rabelais was dissatisfied with the paratextual effects of the “Ancien Prologue”—probably because he felt that its argumentative density would not be grasped by the intended reader. This argument was based on an ingenious wordplay on the juridical adage Do, dico, addico and the words “Croquez pie,” a wordplay in which local geographical references were combined with historical references to a long-forgotten battle: the Battle of Saint-Aubin du Cormier (1483) between the French and the Bretons. In place of the “Ancien Prologue” comes a serious dedication to his patron Cardinal Odet de Chatillon, in which Rabelais presents himself as a doctor who heals his readers of melancholy—a topos that he had used previously in the prologue of his Pantagruel, but in a less serious way. He also defends himself against his detractors by pointing out his earlier work’s favorable reception by François i. His choice of Odet de Chatillon is also significant for Rabelais’s position in his political and religious actuality: Odet de Chatillon was one of the representatives of the Gallicanist movement, which sought more independence for the French Church from papal Rome, and

5 Duval, Design, 78. 6 Duval, Design, 48.

332

smith

to that end was willing to negotiate with the German Lutherans and the Anglican Church. Odet de Chatillon would later flee to England in 1562 and enter the Anglican Church. This dedication is followed by a long prologue, addressed to the benevolent reader, to whom Rabelais recommends mediocritas (i.e., moderation, the golden mean in everything, a mild version of ancient stoicism). At the base of the complex structure of the new prologue is a tripartition: a moderate wish of health to the reader, a reflection on the importance of mediocritas, and the reassertion of the importance of moderation. The second part contains another tripartition: the concept of mediocritas is illustrated by three examples of moderate wishes, done by simple people: Zacchaeus wanting to see Christ (Luke 19:1–10), the woodcutter wanting back his axe (coignée), which had fallen into the river Jordan (2Kings 6:4–7), and another woodcutter, who also lost his axe and who asked Jupiter for help. This last fable story, known from a much shorter version by Aesop (“Mercury and the Woodcutter”), is much amplified by a long and dazzling intervention by Priapus, the phallic god of fertility. This intervention is once again subdivided into three parts: the fable narrative of the dog and the fox, a comic reference to the university philosophers’ debate between Petrus Ramus and Pierre Galland, and a discussion on linguistic ambiguity (that is, the scabrous second meaning of the word coignée). This narrative structure of embedding has a preparatory function: it announces similar narrative embedding in the book itself, especially in the episode of the Chiquanous (6). Mediocritas is affiliated with “Pantagruelism,” a concept regularly referred to in Rabelais’s works. The 1552 prologue gives its most complete definition: “c’est certaine gayeté d’esprit conficte en mespris des choses fortuites” (oc 523; cw 425). As we shall see, this mediocritas is thematized in the book itself by Pantagruel, who in periods of danger (the storm, the sea monster) brings about the golden mean between piety and action, between the superstitious diffidence of Panurge and the blasphemous overactivity of frère Jean. However, the Prologue’s lessons of mediocritas are ambiguous. After all, the way the concept is presented is far from moderate. The way in which Zacchaeus expresses his wish to see Christ is even contrary to moderation: “Il trepigne, il trotigne, il s’efforce, il s’escarte …” (oc 525; cw 427). The same goes for Couillatris, the woodcutter who implores Jupiter to restore his lost axe: “Ma coingnée Juppiter, ma coingnée, ma coingnée, ou deniers pour en achapter une autre. Helas ma paouvre coingnée.” This imploration is indeed excessive, as the irritated Jupiter remarks: “Quel diable (demanda Juppiter) est là bas, qui hurle si horriblement?” (oc 526; cw 428) As is often the case with Rabelais, there is an insoluble contradiction between content (moderation) and (immoderate) form.

interpreting the quart livre

4

333

Intertextualities

Through numerous quotations and references the Quart Livre places itself in a broad intertext. The tune is set in the book’s opening chapter. In the space of a few pages, the reader comes across more or less explicit references to the following: Ovid’s Fasti; Psalm 114 in the French translation by Clément Marot; and a salvo of learning at the end of the chapter, including Nepos, Pomponius Mela, and Pliny the Elder. All these references—located at the most strategic place in the book, namely its opening chapter—give important information regarding how the book should be read. The reference to the Fasti confers a festivitas, which permeates the entire book. The quotation of Marot’s translation of Psalm 114 (“When Israel came out of Egypt”), adopted as the militant song of the Protestants, situates the book in the context of Evangelism (see below). It also makes the reader alert to the multiple meanings of the book—most canonical examples of textual polysemy involve the four-part interpretation of this psalm by the Church Fathers, and the application of their interpretation by Dante, not to the Bible, but to his own Divine Comedy. And the references to important texts from history, cosmography, and natural history announce the presence of scientific discourse in the Quart Livre. Also interesting are the writers and works that are not mentioned but are still at the root of many episodes of the Quart Livre. Their function is varied: they serve as sources and models of inspiration, but they are also objects of rewriting, pastiche, and parody. The four most important of these works are: the anonymous Les navigations de Panurge; A True History by Lucian of Samosata; Jacques Cartier’s Brief récit; and quest literature, especially Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece. Just as Rabelais was inspired by the anonymous Grandes Chroniques Gargantuines while writing Gargantua and Pantagruel, for his Quart Livre he was likewise triggered by another anonymous booklet, Les navigations de Panurge (1538), also known under the title Le disciple de Pantagruel. Using Rabelais’s characters, this booklet narrates a navigation made by Panurge, who encounters some monstrous people, who reappear in the Quart Livre: Bringuenarilles (7) and the Andouilles (12). The booklet’s last episode narrates Panurge’s visit to the Isles Eloides, governed by Eolus, King of the Winds. This episode could have inspired Rabelais’s wind motif, omnipresent in the Quart Livre. The booklet also contains the episode of the Lanternes, which will be rewritten in the Cinquiesme Livre. At the beginning of Les navigations de Panurge, Lucian’s A True History is mentioned as being one of the author’s main models. In the 1520s Lucian was one of Rabelais’s favorite authors. During this period Rabelais translated

334

smith

some of Lucian’s works, probably from Greek to French and possibly including Lucian’s A True History.7 A True History is one of the best-known examples of the liar’s tale—a genre based on the comic, paradoxical convention between the author (or narrator) and the reader: the more the author’s reliability and truthfulness are stressed, the more his tale turns out to be a lie. The underlying structure of this convention is the so-called liar’s paradox. This convention implies a parodic reversal of the serious authentications we find in authentic travel accounts and historical works. The Quart Livre is full of this kind of parodied protestation of veracity.8 Chapter 38 opens in this vein; it is entirely devoted to proving the incredible existence of living chitterlings. The homodiegetic narrator calls upon his eyewitness account: Vous truphez icy, Beuveurs, et ne croyez que ainsi soit en verité comme je vous raconte. Je ne sçaurois que vous en faire. Croyez le si voulez: si ne voulez, allez y veoir. Mais je sçay bien ce que je veids. Ce feut en l’ isle Farouche. oc 628; cw 518

Lucianist is also how the Rabelaisian text presents itself: as a literary puzzle, in which the reader is expected to recognize and appreciate the parodied literary processes and works. Christopher Robinson notes about A True History: “The purpose of the tissue of parody and pastiche in A True History is quite clear. It is to amuse, to dazzle, and to tease the audience by keeping them alert for stylistic and thematic allusions to well-known works.”9 This is perfectly applicable to the Quart Livre. One of the serious texts parodied by Rabelais is Jacques Cartier’s Brief récit, an account of the journey Cartier made to Canada in 1535. When comparing the opening lines of this voyage, published in 1545, with those of the Quart Livre, one notes that all kinds of thematic, lexical, and syntactical elements are parodied. Thus, the date of departure at Pentecost in Cartier’s voyage is replaced in the Quart Livre by the Roman Vestalia. The Confession, the Mass, and the

7 For these hypotheses, see Smith, “Jean Thenaud and François Rabelais: Some Hypotheses on the Early Reception of Erasmus in French Vernacular Literature,” in The Reception of Erasmus in the Early Modern Period, ed. K.A.E. Enenkel (Leiden: 2013), 211–236 (227–233). The most recent and extensive literature on Rabelais’s lucianism is Romain Menini, Rabelais altérateur: “Graeciser en François” (Paris: 2014), 133–556 (“Nasier, le ‘Nez de Lucian’”); on Rabelais’s translation of Lucian’s True History, see Menini, Rabelais altérateur, 186–187. 8 For a full analysis of this comic strategy of verification, see Smith, Voyage et écriture, 29–34. 9 Christopher Robinson, Lucian and His Influence in Europe (London: 1979), 26.

interpreting the quart livre

335

episcopal blessing in Cartier are replaced in Rabelais by a sober religious meeting, without ceremonies, based on the Erasmian ideals of a return to the early Christian church that Erasmian humanism longs to restore. Cartier’s 3 ships are multiplied to the highly symbolic number 12: references are made to the 12 ships of Ajax heading for Troy, the 12 tribes of Israel that departed from Egypt, and the 12 apostles—and, importantly, during his navigation, Pantagruel is accompanied by 12 persons, most of them known from Rabelais’s previous books.10 While Cartier had to wait a few days for a favorable wind before being able to depart, Rabelais emphasizes that the Pantagruelists departed immediately. Also, the direction in which Pantagruelists sail is based on Cartier’s, i.e., to the north (later on, typical northern natural phenomena are described: a tarandus [which prosaically can be identified as a reindeer], a whale, and frost so severe that words freeze). But Cartier’s route branches off to the northwest, while Pantagruel and his friends will deflect to the northeast. The indications of wind direction are a poeticized rewriting of the precise indications of the Brief récit and similar sea voyage reports: “Zéphir nous continuoit en participation d’ un peu du Garbin” (ql 9, 556; cw 454), “Le Garbin nous souffloit en pouppe” (ql 10, 560; cw 458), “feut voile faicte au serain et delicieux Aguyon” (ql 29, 606; cw 498). Incidentally, it is not just Cartier’s travelogue which is at the basis of the Quart Livre, but also other cosmographic literature. This is evidenced by the precisely described route, and the reference to the “grande et universelle Hydrographie” (ql 1, 537; cw 437). It is not impossible that Rabelais is referring here to one of the many editions of Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia. Some of these editions give huge world maps, with a large amount of data, including the references to Nepos, Pomponius Mela, and Pliny, which Rabelais put at the end of his first chapter. It is also likely that for the episode of the physetère (11) Rabelais made use of the Carta marina (1539) by the Swedish geographer Olaus Magnus. Near the Faroe Islands (the name of which is distorted by Rabelais to “Farouche”) Olaus Magnus depicts a water-spouting sea monster, named Pistr[is] sive Phise[ter], attacking a ship, just as in the Quart Livre.11 Claude Gaignebet discovered that Rabelais, in addition to hydrographies, cosmographies, travel reports, and nautical maps, also used a celestial map or 10

11

Two main characters, Panurge and frère Jean; nine secondary characters, Epistemon, Eustenes, Carpalim, Ponocrates, Eudemon, Gymnaste, Rhizotome, Xenomanes, and Jamet Brayer; plus the homodiegetic narrator: Alcofribas. Only Xenomanes and Jamet Brayer are new. See Nicolas Le Cadet and Olivier Halévy, Rabelais. Quart Livre (Neuilly: 2011), 24. Povl Skarup, “Le physétère et l’ île Farouche de Rabelais,” er 6 (1965): 57–59.

336

smith

globe. According to his interpretation the trajectory of the Quart Livre matches the imaginary line between the constellations that is formed starting on 15 June. Thus, the episode of the sheep merchant Dindenault (3) corresponds with the constellation Aries, the storm episode (8) with the Twins, and the episode of the sea monster (11) with the dual constellations of Perseus and Andromeda, which are located in the immediate vicinity of Cetus (Whale)—Pantagruel defeating the sea monster is explicitly compared to the mythological hero Perseus, who rescued the beautiful Andromeda from the claws of a sea monster. Pantagruel’s journey can be traced on the celestial maps and globes of that time. Thus, the giant makes an interstellar journey, following the example of some of Lucian’s characters (A True History, Icaromenippus), and fulfilling the promise of a journey into space, a promise made in the final lines of the Pantagruel: “il [Pantagruel] visita les regions de la lune” (P 34, 336; cw 244). Another genre that is parodied in the Quart Livre is the quest. In the past, Rabelaisian scholars have pointed to medieval quests, which bear some resemblance to the Quart Livre, such as the legendary sea voyage of Saint Brendan, who navigated from one allegorical island to the other, or the novels about King Arthur and his Round Table, which certainly play an important role in Rabelais’s books. But even more so, one can think of the epic quests from antiquity, such as Homer’s Odyssey, to which Rabelais refers explicitly several times. In this context, one can also think of the relationship between the two trickster figures Panurge and Odysseus, to the corresponding themes of monsters, storms, and miraculous islands, and to the liar’s tale that Odysseus (Lucian calls him the “father of liars”) tells to the Phaeacians and which, in a sense, is the archetype of the genre. Also present in the Quart Livre is Aeneas’s journey, narrated by Virgil in his Aeneid. Virgil narrates the journey that Aeneas made from burning Troy to Italy, where he settled and later founded the city of Rome. Panurge compares himself explicitly to Achates, the bosom friend of Aeneas, thus implying that Pantagruel is a second Aeneas. In addition, the day that Pantagruel departs on his sea journey is the same day that Aeneas, according to tradition, arrived in Italy. This last aspect is in line with the framework of the international politics of François i, who wanted to create a national unity that would form a political counterweight to Charles v. The French considered themselves the true successors of the Romans. In their eyes it was not modern Rome, with its depraved morals, but Paris that was destined to take over the torch of civilization, just as ancient Rome was the heir of glorious Troy. In her Pléiade edition of Rabelais’s works, Mireille Huchon has shown that a third large antique quest lies at the basis of the Quart Livre, namely the quest of the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. Rabelais’s reference text is

interpreting the quart livre

337

not the most famous version of the quest by Apollonius of Rhodes, but the lesser-known, anonymous Orphic Argonautica, so called because the mythical singer Orpheus accompanied and narrated the quest in the first person, as a homodiegetic narrator. It turns out that Pantagruel’s travel is based on the return journey of the Argonauts, which, after the conquest of the Fleece, started from the Caspian Sea and passed partly by land northwards through the lands of the Macrobes, Gelones, Arimasps, and Scythes, and unto the Arctic Ocean. Hence, they departed in a south-westerly direction and went along the western European coast to the Strait of Gibraltar, from where they eventually reached their homeland Crete. Transposed to the Quart Livre, this also explains why on the first island, Medamothi, mention is already made of Phrygia, Scythia, and the Gelones, and the Golden Fleece is mentioned by name in the next episode. Later in the book the Macrobes and the Arimasps also are mentioned. Huchon’s discovery sheds new light on the Quart Livre. On the one hand the book can be placed in the context of Orphic mysticism and initiation (which will be discussed more later). On the other hand, national-political elements also are identifiable: François i and Henri ii regarded themselves as the successors of the powerful dukes of Burgundy, the creators of the Order of the Golden Fleece. On the level of international politics, Pantagruel (read: France or the French king) continues, as it were, the triumphal march of the Argonauts. However, nothing is simple with Rabelais: Huchon’s interpretation brings a curious paradox to light. The quest is not only based on the search of Aeneas or the return journey of the Argonauts but reflects the reverse journey of the Argonauts. Sailing from France to the northeast, Pantagruel takes a route in a direction opposite to that of the conquerors of the Golden Fleece.

5

Political and Religious Satire

With his quotations, references, and allusions Rabelais takes positions on current political affairs at regional, national, and international levels. As the personal physician of Cardinal Jean du Bellay, the French ambassador at the Papal Court in Rome, Rabelais was well aware of the international political situation. This can be seen in the Sciomachie (1549), which the Cardinal commissioned Rabelais to write when the latter was in Rome, at the time he was working on his Quart Livre. Contemporary politics continued to be informed by the rivalry between Charles v and the French king, a rivalry Henri ii had inherited from his father in 1549. As in Gargantua, Rabelais shoots his arrows at the French King’s archenemy. In the 1552 prologue Charles v is referred to as a “petit homme tout estropié” (527; cw 428) (alluding to the emperor’s poor health), who despite his

338

smith

physical impotence keeps all peoples under control. On the other hand, in the book itself, Charles v is presented as the sinister giant Quaresmeprenant. Around 1550, the French position in the field of international politics may be termed “Gallicanism,” a commitment to French Catholicism independent of the Pope, who was politically supported by Charles v. Gallicanism is most clearly reflected in the political discussions between Henri ii and the new Pope Julius iii (1550–1555) on the subject of the new Council, which, against the wishes of Henri ii, was held in Trent, at that time Imperial territory. The Council was widely seen as a threat to the independence of the Gallican Church. The French considered the Council as a further source for dissent and hardening— history has proven that the French were right. Rabelais regularly and explicitly refers to the Council of Trent by naming it the Council of “Chesil” (the Briefve Declaration teaches us that “Chesil” in Hebrew means “fool”). Rabelais expresses the French position that the Council is not ecumenical, but causes dissension between Roman Catholics (Quaresmeprenant, the Papimanes) and Protestants (Andouilles, the Papefigues), despite France’s efforts to bring about conciliation: “Mais depuys la denonciation du concile national de Chesil [ils] se sont horrificquement aigriz, envenimez, indignez, et obstinez en leurs couraiges: et n’est possible y remedier. Plus toust auriez vous les chatz et ratz; les chiens et lievres ensemble reconcilié” (ql 35, 622; cw 513). Jean Du Bellay’s efforts in the areas of diplomacy and reconciliation are thematized in the attitude of Pantagruel, who is, in the case of foreign policy, tacitly disapproving of the convictions, attitudes, and customs of the strange peoples encountered, but at least avoiding conflicts. It is striking how Rabelais, in a comical way, relativizes the opposing views: indeed, the behavior of the Andouilles is more in line with the extravagant way of living of Papal Rome than with the ascetic and strict attitude of the Calvinists of Geneva, and vice versa: Quaresmeprenant is closer to the ascetic ambiance of Geneva than to the luxuriant lifestyle of Rome. Rabelais’s position in terms of foreign policy is best shown in the 1552 prologue: this is the Menippean point of view, also expressed in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly: the Olympic gods look laughingly down on the bustling people beneath. However, the political positioning of Rabelais in French domestic policy is much fiercer and more focused in direct response to people such as Calvin on the one hand, and the right-winged Catholics Gabriel du Puy-Herbault and Guillaume Postel on the other. Rabelais’s mockery becomes bitter when it comes to these criticasters. Thus, he lambastes Guillaume Postel (who had called the “Pantagruellus” and the “Abbatia Thelemeton” [the Abbey of Theleme] creations ungodly and Lutheran), Jean Calvin (who had attacked Rabelais in his book Des scandales), and Gabriel du Puy-Herbault (whose Theotimus

interpreting the quart livre

339

accused Rabelais of obscenity and profanity). Rabelais distorts their names, putting them together among the monstrous offspring of Antiphysie (AntiNature) without differentiating between zealous Catholics and reformers of Geneva: “les Maniacles Pistoletz, les Demoniacles Calvins imposteurs de Geneve, les enraigez Putherbes […], et aultres monstres difformes et contrefaicts en despit de Nature” (ql 32, 615; cw 507). Rabelais’s Gallicanism is interwoven with the so-called Evangelism. A good and succinct definition of Evangelism is given by Donald Frame: a Christian belief whose insistence on the primacy of the Bible makes the believer his own authority, rather than the Church as the accredited interpreter of an authorized text. Sixteenth-century Evangelism was thus close to Protestantism, differing mainly in seeking only peaceful reform within the Church.12 The primacy of the Bible makes the Evangelicals discredit five of the Church’s seven sacraments because they are not instituted by the Bible—and they believe the two others, baptism and communion, should be reformed according to early Christian rites. This mindset is displayed in several episodes. It is visible, among others in the departure episode of the Quart Livre, from which the traditional elements of Mass and confession are removed, and also in the book’s final episodes, which propose a rewrite of the Eucharist and baptism (see below). Another aspect of Evangelism that came to the fore in the Quart Livre is Rabelais’s opinion on free will, which can be captured in the notion of “synergism”: not only is there divine predestination, but the Christian must cooperate with God. This synergetic attitude is increasingly emphasized, as is evident from a comparison between the storm episodes of the 1548 and 1552 editions. In the 1552 edition the plural “Dieux” has been replaced by the singular “Dieu,” and a long explanation has been added, highlighting Rabelais’s synergism and Paulinism (“le sainct Envoyé”), as can been seen in the following table:13

12 13

Donald M. Frame, François Rabelais: A Study (New York: 1977), 150. This table visualizes the most evident differences between both versions. In the left column of the table I have italicized the words that are left out in the 1552 edition. In the right column I italicized the words that replace the words of the 1548 edition, and those that are added. My quotation of the 1548 edition is taken from François Rabelais, Les Cinq Livres, eds. J. Céard, G. Defaux, and M. Simonin (Paris: 1994), 1295.

340

smith

1548 edition

1552 edition

Je [= Epistemon] considere, que si vrayement mourir, est (comme est) de necessité fatale & inevitable: en telle ou telle façon mourir, est part en la volonté des Dieux, part en nostre arbitre propre. Pourtant, iceulx fault il implorer, invocquer, prier, requerir, supplier. Mais ne fault il faire but & borne. De nostre part convient pareillement nous evertuer, & leur ayder au moyen & remede.

Je [= Epistemon] consydere, que si vrayement mourir est (comme est) de necessité fatale et inévitable, en telle ou telle heure, en telle ou telle façon mourir, est en la saincte volunté de Dieu. Pourtant, icelluy fault incessamment implorer, invocquer, prier, requerir, supplier. Mais là ne fault faire but et bourne: de nostre part convient pareillement nous evertuer, et comme le dict le sainct Envoyé, estre cooperateurs avecques luy.

6

Multidiscursivity

The Quart Livre serves as a framework for a large number of discourses. Of these I treat the three most notable ones: 1) dialogue and theatre, 2) description and enumeration, and 3) satirical eulogy. 6.1 Dialogue and Theatre Unlike other authentic and imaginary travelogues, most of the Quart Livre is taken up with dialogues in direct speech. Dialogues, of course, occur first of all in the form of information exchange between the travelers and the islanders they encounter. In many cases this gives rise to long discussions in dialogue form between the travelling companions. Thus, the Macraeons inform the Pantagruelists about the cause of the storm—information which the travelers continue to discuss in vivid dialogue. As mentioned earlier, the dialogue between the travelling companions seems more important than the visit to the island itself, which is a mere pretext for entertaining table talk. The dialogue between characters can also be started in order to comment on a natural phenomenon (sea monster, calm, storm). Most dialogues are characterized by a high degree of naturalness. The dialogues are displayed in direct speech—in which the interlocutor is very naturally often interrupted by someone else in the midst of his sentence, which is picked up afterwards by the first interlocutor. This naturalness is, however, broken by the long enumerations, often in the form of vertical lists, which “normal” dialogues lack.

interpreting the quart livre

341

In most cases the comparison with theatre is obvious. In the episode of Dindenault the text also takes the typographical form and layout of a play: the names of both interlocutors are abbreviated as “pan.” and “le march.” It is therefore understandable that this episode, which ends tragically for Dindenault, is qualified by critics as a “comedy of cruelty.” In this context, it is striking how often the Quart Livre refers to stage and staging. Epistemon refers to the farce of the Dumb Wife, in which Rabelais himself played a role. Another anecdote, about the Sieur de Basché, embedded in the episode of the Chiquanous, is explicitly qualified as “tragicque farce” (ql 13, 570; cw 467). Embedded in this episode is also the anecdote about the poet François Villon, in the function of stage director, which, before Rabelais, is an activity that was not attributed to him. 6.2 Descriptions Contrary to dialogues in direct speech, descriptions are an integral part in travelogues both authentic and imaginary. The Quart Livre contains various types of descriptions, of which the natural history descriptions stand out the most. At the end of the Tiers Livre Rabelais had already written a pastiche of a botanical description (of the Pantagruélion). In the Quart Livre special attention is paid to zoological descriptions. These address miraculous creatures, such as the tarandus, the unicorn, the flying fish, Sus Minerva, or Quaresmeprenant, and it is not clear whether Quaresmeprenant is a human or an animal. The description of the tarandus is the first zoological description of the book, and therefore sets a benchmark by which the reader can gauge the other descriptions: Tarande est un animal grand comme un jeune taureau, portant teste comme est d’un cerf, peu plus grande: avecques cornes insignes largement ramées: les piedz forchuz: le poil long comme d’ un grand Ours: la peau peu moins dure, qu’un corps de cuirasse […] il change de couleur selon la varieté des lieux es quelz il paist et demoure. Cela luy est commun avecques le Poulpe marin, c’est le Polype, avecques Thoes: avecques les Lycaons de Indie: avecques le Chameleon. ql 2, 541–542; cw 440–441

In this description the source and canonical basic structure are clearly visible. It is based on the description of the tarandus by Pliny the Elder. From a stylistic viewpoint, Rabelais’s description is built up by a series of similes, each consisting of a tenor (in French: comparé) and a vehicle (comparant). The animal is, as it were, cut into recognizable pieces (the tenors being head, antlers, feet, hair, hide, and its color-changing properties), which are compared with the vehicles,

342

smith

all of which save one (the cuirass) are the body parts of other, more familiar animals—respectively, a young bull, a stag, and a bear—and the animal was also compared for its wondrous mimetism to that of some other, lesser-known animals, like the polyp, thos, lycaon, and chameleon. While in serious travelogues descriptions serve to render the wondrous reality, Rabelais plays with the reality of the described animals; thus, the tarandus figures in Nowhere Land. And concerning the unicorn, also described in the Medamothi episode: in the 1550s, contemporary scholars doubted the existence of the animal. However, regarding the existence of Sus Minerva there was no doubt: this creature was clearly invented by Rabelais. The description of this animal differs from the preceding ones by its vehicles: the animal’s body parts are not compared to those of other animals, but to precious gems. Rabelais’s play with descriptive norms reaches a climax in the description of Quaresmeprenant, which takes the form of long vertical lists of the monster’s 77 internal body parts (chapter 30) and 64 external body parts (chapter 31)— each body part being a tenor compared to a vehicle. These vehicles are not body parts from other animals, nor are they precious gems, but they are human artefacts, which have no, or only vague, physical resemblances with the tenors they are supposed to explain. This is part of Rabelais’s play on the traditional norms of description. Normally, the longer and more precise the description, the greater the description’s representability, according to the rhetorical principle of enargeia or evidentia. In the case of the description of Quaresmeprenant: by its length and the explicative inadequacy of its vehicles, every attempt to visualize this creature is doomed to failure.14 The description of Quaresmeprenant takes us to another striking characteristic of the Quart Livre: enumeration, which in many cases is visualized as a vertical list.15 The Quart Livre contains, in addition to the anatomy of Quaresmeprenant, three other long vertical lists, all of which are constructed in a different way. Thus, the list of valiant cooks is more akin to the descriptions

14

15

For other parodic aspects (concerning medical description, and the conventions of the literary portrait [descriptio puellae]), see Smith, Dispositio: Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (Leiden: 2007), 43–63; Marie Madeleine Fontaine, “Quaresmeprenant: L’image littéraire et la contestation de l’ analogie médicale,” in Rabelais in Glasgow, eds. J.A. Coleman and C.M. Scollen-Jimack (Glasgow: 1984), 87–112; and Dominique Brancher, “Un monstre de langage: L’anatomie de Quaresmeprenant,” Versants 56.1 (2009): 115–137. See also Raphaël Cappellen and Paul J. Smith, “Entre l’auteur et l’éditeur: La forme-liste chez Rabelais,” ar 1 (2017): 121–144 (138–142). On the lists of the Quart Livre, see also Chantal Liaroutzos, “La poétique des listes dans le Quart livre,” in En relisant le Quart livre de Rabelais, eds. N. Dauvois and J. Vignes, special issue of Cahiers Textuel 35 (2012): 101–109.

interpreting the quart livre

343

of the Tiers Livre, i.e., two columns that invite a reading that is both vertical and horizontal. This list of cooks parodies those of the ancient (Homer) and medieval (The Song of Roland) epic traditions. The next list enumerates the meats and birds given as offerings for Gaster’s fat days (145 birds and game) and for his meatless days (135 fishes). The exhaustiveness of this list was appreciated by contemporary zoologists, among them Pierre Belon.16 It can be read as a parody of the cookbooks that appeared in previous years.17 However, this list is intended not only to show off the author’s knowledge on culinary and zoological matters. It also presents a comic inversion of the rhetorical treaties of antiquity that recommend moderation in enumerating unimportant things. One can think especially of Lucian, who, in a serious treatise on historiography, stipulates that one should not furnish all possible, but superfluous, details. He does so by resorting to a culinary metaphor: One must look to the subject matter to provide this rather than to the words and phrases—I mean, if you run quickly over small and less essential things, while giving adequate treatment to matters of importance; indeed a great deal should even be omitted. When you feast your friends and all is ready you do not for that reason in the middle of all your pasties, fowl, oysters, wild boars, hare, and choice fish cutlets, serve up salt fish and pease-parridge because, that, too, is at hand—you will ignore the humble fare.18 The comic reversal by Rabelais is evident when we compare his list with the serious description that Rabelais made in the Sciomachie of a sumptuous meal that was organized by his patron, Cardinal Jean Du Bellay: Je ne parleray point du nombre, et rares especes des poissons icy serviz: il est par trop excessif. Bien vous diray qu’à ce banquet furent servies plus de mille cinq cens pieces de four: j’entens patez, tartes et dariolles. oc 973

16 17

18

Lazare Sainéan, L’ influence et la réputation de Rabelais (Paris: 1930), 220–221. See Timothy J. Tomasik, “Fishes, Fowl, and La Fleur de toute cuysine: Gaster and Gastronomy in Rabelais’s Quart Livre,” in Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories, ed. J.F. Fitzpatrick (Aldershot: 2010), 25–51. Lucian, How to Write History, in Works, ed. and trans. K. Kilburn, vol. 6 (London: 1959), 67–69.

344

smith

[I will not speak about the number and rare species of fish served here. That would be too much. But I will tell you that at this banquet more than 1500 baking dishes were served: I mean pastries, tartes and flans.] What Rabelais refuses to do in a serious text, he does in a comical one. The list of venomous animals is the last one in the Quart Livre. It is Rabelais’s only list that is in alphabetical order. How to explain this choice? Alphabetical order, commonly used in zoological discourse since the Middle Ages, was discussed among contemporary zoologists. On the one hand, the authoritative zoological works by Conrad Gesner, published from 1550, adopted an alphabetical order; on the other hand, in France, Pierre Belon preferred a presentation of animals according to a natural classification. As with the medical issues of the description of Quaresmeprenant, Rabelais is involving himself here in the scientific debate of his time. All Rabelaisian lists have a disorienting effect. They de-automatize the reader’s perception. The quantity of elements listed makes the reader constantly hesitate between the whole and its parts, between the interpretation of the countless details and the overall interpretation of the cumulative description as a whole. This effect on the reader is comparable to the one that the paintings of Bosch, Brueghel, and Arcimboldi have on the viewer. 6.3 Satirical Eulogy In the domain of the paradoxical or satirical eulogy, Rabelais continues on the path on which he embarked in the Tiers Livre, with his Praise of Debts (pronounced by Panurge) and his Praise of the herb Pantagruelion (pronounced by the narrator). If we leave aside the prologues of 1548 and 1552, the eulogies of the Quart Livre are pronounced by the characters or by the narrator. The book contains five eulogies of substantial length. These are, in chronological order: 1) Dindenault’s praise of his sheep, 2) the narrator’s praise of Pantagruel’s wondrous skill in javelin throwing, 3) the narrator’s speech by which he tries to convince the reader of the veracity of his incredible story about the Andouilles (the entire chapter 38 is dedicated to this topic: “Comment Andouilles ne sont à mespriser entre les humains”), 4) Homenaz’s praise of the Decretales, and 5) the narrator’s praise of the omnipotent Messer Gaster. As in the case of the descriptions and lists, the mutual variety between the eulogies is striking. The differences between the individual eulogies come to the fore when we compare them to the eulogies in Rabelais’s previous works. Dindenault’s praise of his sheep belongs to the bonimenteur praises of the marketplace, studied by Mikhail Bakhtin—for instance, Alcofrybas Nasier’s praise of the Grandes Chroniques in the Prologue of Pantagruel. The praise of Panta-

interpreting the quart livre

345

gruel’s skill with the javelin coincides with the praises of comparable prowess of the young giants in Pantagruel and Gargantua. The narrator’s argumentation on the plausibility of the existence of the Andouilles reminds us of the narrator’s argumentation about the possibility of 11-month pregnancies (in Gargantua). Homenaz’s praises and fallacies make us think of certain passages of the Tiers Livre, for instance Bridoye’s argumentation for throwing dices in judicial trials—his argumentation is absurd for all the interlocutors, except for the orator himself. And Messer Gaster’s praise has its pendant in the Praise of Debts.

7

Islands19

According to Frank Lestringant, “the archipelago of the Quart Livre […] is a collection of heterotopias.”20 The Quart Livre presents the islands visited by the voyagers as a series of satirical heterotopias: every island can indeed be seen as a particular monstrous aberration from the ideal norm. In order to accentuate the heterotopian character of the islands, Rabelais adopts the traditional way of describing the monstrous, by joining together the monster and its habitat. The following observations by Claude Kappler on 15th-century descriptions of the monstrous are particularly applicable to the islands in Rabelais’s book: “There is not any duality between the creature and the place that it inhabits; every creature is its own place.”21 This coincidence of man and habitat manifests itself in two forms in the Quart Livre: first by reducing the description of the island to a simple mention of it. In several episodes, the island does not have any physical description, whereas its inhabitants and their strange customs are described at length and in detail. This is the case for the island of Tapinois, ruled by the giant Quaresmeprenant. The second form consists of the use of a very strong environmental determinism, by which, for instance, the earth’s fertility automatically implies the fertility of the inhabitants. Thus, the isle of Cheli is “grande, fertile, riche, et populeuse” (ql 10, 560; cw 458). The same can be said of the “benoiste isle des Papimanes,” of which the fertility can be found not only in the copious meal offered to the Pantagruelists (“feussent chevraulx, feussent chappons, 19

20

21

This paragraph is mainly taken from my article “Landscape and Body in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel,” in The Anthropomorphic Lens. Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts, eds. W.S. Melion, B. Rothstein, and M. Weemans (Leiden: 2015), 67–92 (81–87). Frank Lestringant, “Paysages anthropomorphes à la Renaissance,” in Nature et paysages: L’ émergence d’une nouvelle subjectivité à la Renaissance, ed. D. de Courcelles (Paris: 2006), 261–279. Lestringant is referring to Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia. Claude Kappler, Monstres, démons et merveilles à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: 1980), 41.

346

smith

feussent cochons, [des quelz y a foizon en Papimanie],22 feussent pigeons, connilzs, levreaulx, cocqs de Inde”), but also in the pretty girls who serve the meals: “tout le sert et dessert feut porté par les filles pucelles mariables du lieu, belles, je vous affie, saffrettes, blondelettes, doulcettes et de bonne grace” (ql 51, 656; cw 546–547). In contrast, the island of the Papefigues, once fertile and prosperous, is now suffering from the “calamité du lieu” (ql 47, 648; cw 539). The climate has changed dramatically: “tous les ans avoient gresle, tempeste, peste, famine, et tout malheur, comme eterne punition du peché de leurs ancestres et parens,” causing “la misere et calamité du peuple” (ql 45, 643; cw 534). The Quart Livre, however, contains three island episodes that deviate, more or less, in that they do not present man and habitat in their mutual relationship, but on the contrary, (seemingly) in contrast with each other. The chorography of the island Farouche does not present the island as being “farouche” at all. The island is presented as a locus amoenus: it has “un petit port desert vers le midy situé lez une touche de boys haulte, belle, et plaisante: de laquelle sortoit un delicieux ruisseau d’eau doulce, claire, et argentine” (ql 35, 620; cw 512). The discrepancy between the island and its name can be explained by the highly opinionated, aggressive nature of its inhabitants, the Andouilles.23 The “admirable” (but anonymous) island of Messer Gaster presents a chorography comparable, in a sense, to the lecture and understanding of a hermetic text—difficult on the surface, but with rich content hidden beneath. Elle [= the island] de tous coustez pour le commencement estoit scabreuse, pierreuse, montueuse, infertile, mal plaisante à l’ oeil, tresdifficile aux pieds et peu moins inaccessible que le mons du Daulphiné […] Surmontans la difficulté de l’entrée, à peine bien grande et non sans suer, trouvasmes le dessus du mons tant plaisant, tant fertile, tant salubre, et delicieux, que je pensoys estre le vray Jardin et Paradis terrestre. ql 57, 671; cw 560

Pantagruel interprets this place as the “manoir de Areté (c’ est Vertus) par Hesiode descript, sans toutesfoys prejudice de plus saine opinion” (ql 57, 671–672; cw 560). But the place turns out to be neither Paradise nor the Rock of Virtue, but the dwelling place of a monstrous godhead: Messer Gaster, the Belly, “premier maistre es ars du monde” (ql 57, 672; cw 560). Thus, the episode becomes 22 23

One notes the satire. As we noticed above, the onomastic of the island is multi-layered, because “farouche” also can be explained as a deformation of the name of the Faroe Islands, depicted in the contemporary mappemondes and cosmographies.

interpreting the quart livre

347

an etiological myth that explains how Gaster forced mankind to invent agriculture and industry to feed him. But Gaster also is responsible for some other, more magical inventions, which are mentioned in classical literature: the “art et moyen de evocquer la pluye des Cieulx,” and “de suspendre et arrester la pluye en l’air, et sus mer la faire tomber. Inventoit art et moyen de aneantir la gresle, supprimer les vens, destourner la tempeste” (ql 61, 683; cw 574–575). All of these arts are mentioned by Rabelais’s sources in these matters: Pausanias and Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia. The relationship between body and space is further thematized in a multilayered way, also in connection with the art of reading and interpreting, in the episode of the Isles of the Macreons (ch. 25). In the forests of these islands, the voyagers find the ruins of a much earlier age: Et par la forest umbrageuse et deserte descouvrit plusieurs vieulx temples ruinez, plusieurs obelisces, Pyramides, monumens, et sepulchres antiques, avecques inscriptions et epitaphes divers. Les uns en letres Hieroglyphiques, les aultres en languaige Ionicque, les aultres en langue Arabicque, Agarene, Sclavonicque, et aultres. ql 25, 598; cw 491

Epistemon—the learned one—takes “curieusement” notice of all these inscriptions. This landscape, full of ruins and inscriptions, is reminiscent of those found in Arcadian literature, of which Sannazaro’s Arcadia (ca. 1489) is the best-known example, widely read and imitated in Rabelais’s time and translated into French in 1544 by Jean Martin. However, the most obvious (albeit not explicitly mentioned) source for this episode is Francesco Colonna’s antiquarian novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), also translated by Jean Martin in 1546 and much appreciated both by artists (for its trendsetting woodcuts) and authors in the Renaissance. This book was well known to Rabelais: in other episodes, not only does he refer to this book twice (on the question of hieroglyphics), he also translates some episodes from it, and some of these translations are used for some chapters of the Cinquiesme Livre. The significance of this passage is multi-layered: the learned Epistemon trying to decipher the hieroglyphic inscriptions certainly represents a kind of mise en abyme, a projection of the ideal reader, who finds himself searching and interpreting the hidden meanings of Rabelais’s books. As is the case with so many other episodes in the Quart Livre, this episode is about reading and interpreting.

348 8

smith

Language and Sign

The Quart Livre reflects Rabelais’s continuous interest in language. On this topic important information is given by the Briefve Declaration, an anonymous glossary containing 178 entries that are arranged in their order of occurrence in the book. There is no consensus about the authorship of this glossary: because several entries are contradictory to Rabelais’s text, or because many of them are useless or redundant additions to it, André Tournon argues that this glossary cannot have been written by Rabelais.24 According to Mireille Huchon, however, the Briefve Declaration is by Rabelais.25 The contradictions and redundancies between glossary and book can be explained by Rabelais’s interest in the wider meanings of words, which do not necessarily correspond to the text. There is another hypothesis: Marie-Luce Demonet considers the glossary to be a parodic pastiche by Rabelais on contemporary glossators.26 Regardless of the glossary’s authenticity, it gives a good impression of the lexical enrichments found in the Quart Livre, although by no means have all neologisms and otherwise difficult words been put into the list. One of the striking things in the glossary is Rabelais’s growing attention to Greek and Hebrew. Even the final word of the book is Hebrew: “Sela” (ql 67, 701; cw 592), meaning “Certainement” (certainly), as the Briefve Declaration explains (oc 713).27 The glossary also points to the use of regional forms, especially expressions from Touraine: “Cahu caha” (“Motz vulgaires en Touraine”), “Marmes, merdigues” (“Juremens de gens villageoys en Touraine”), “Ma dia” (“Maniere de parler vulguaire en Touraine”) (oc 704, 705, and 707, respectively). What the glossary does not make explicit is the presence of specialized jargon, for example in the domain of nautical terminology, which is a mix of different vocabularies, Oceanic and Mediterranean, freshwater and saltwater.28 Also, medical and natural history jargon is important, as we have seen in the list formations discussed above. The Briefve Declaration reflects another striking trend in the Quart Livre: its tendency toward word explication. In this the Briefve Declaration appears occasionally to be the comical competitor of the book itself. This can be seen in the 24 25 26 27 28

André Tournon, “La Briefve Declaration n’ est pas de Rabelais,” er 13 (1976): 133–138. oc, 1588–1589. Marie-Luce Demonet, “Rabelais métalinguiste,” in Le Tiers Livre. Actes du Colloque international de Rome, mars 1996, ed. F. Giacone, (er) 37 (Geneva: 1999), 115–128. On Hebrew, see Katia Campbell, “Du vrai et faux hébreu chez François Rabelais,” in L’ Hébreu au temps de la Renaissance, ed. I. Zinguer (Leiden: 1992), 197–210. Marie-Luce Demonet, “Rabelais, marin d’ eau douce? (Quart Livre),” in Un joyeux quart de sentences, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget (er) 52 (Geneva: 2012), 69–88.

interpreting the quart livre

349

playful redundancy of the author’s comments on the word lasanon (chamber pot): this word occurs two times in the Quart Livre, it receives an explanation given by the narrator in the book itself, and it has two entries in the Briefve Declaration, both referring to the narrator’s explanation (respectively, oc 682, 700, and 712 [twice]). Word formation is another notable element, which on several occasions takes grotesque forms. An amazing lexical productivity can be found, for instance, in the 35 names of the valiant chefs de cuisine, all derived from the stem lardon (ql 40, 632; cw 522–523). Grotesque morphology occurs in the domain of lexical composition, as can be seen in some monstrous word formations, such as: “morrambouzeuezengouzequoquemorguatasacbacguevezinemaffressé” (ql 15, 574; cw 470). Linguistic analysis has shown that the morphological structure of these words is particularly complex.29 Also notable is Rabelais’s frequent use of onomatopoeias, used to various ends—to impose silence: “Paix. St, St, St” (ql, prol., 534; cw 435); to scare: “Hho, hho, hho, hho: brrrourrrs, rrrourrrs, rrrourrrs. Hou, hou hou. Hho, hho, hho” (ql 13, 569; cw 466); or to express fear, as can be seen in Panurge’s interminable lamentations during the tempest: “Bous, bous, bous, paisch, hu, hu, hu, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Je naye. Zalas, Zalas, hu, hu, hu, hu, hu, hu. Bebe bous, bous bobous, bobous, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. Zalas, Zalas” (ql 19, 584; cw 479).30 Linguistic polysemy is omnipresent in the Quart Livre not only on the microscale of words and sentences, but also on the macroscale of whole passages, even episodes. In this last case we are dealing with a phenomenon labelled “hypogrammatic derivation” in literary semiotics: these episodes function as textual remotivation of a pre-existing kernel or “hypogram” (a proper name or an expression or proverb taken literally).31 This is the case with the abovementioned alleged wordplay on Do, dico, addico and “Croquez pie,” sentences that form the basis of the 1548 prologue. The use of hypogrammatic derivation is varied. Mostly the hypogram is given explicitly at the beginning of the passage—which functions as an interpretation, commentary, or elaboration of the initial expression or proper name. In most cases there is a play on the literal and the figurative meaning of the hypogram. A hypogram may engender other

29 30 31

Christophe Clavel, “Dithirambes pour un massacre: Création lexicale et esthétique des genres,” er 44 (2006): 13–30. Romain Menini, “ ‘Babillebabou (disoit il) voicy pis qu’antan’: L’onomatopée dans le Quart Livre,” Styles, genres, auteurs, no. 11, eds. A. Arzoumanov and C. Narjoux (Paris: 2011), 37–54. The notion of “hypogram” was coined by Michael Riffaterre. See Smith, “‘Croquer pie’: Quart Livre, Ancien Prologue,” in Rabelais—Dionysos: Vin, carnaval, ivresse, ed. M. Bideaux (Marseille: 1997), 97–108 (97).

350

smith

ones—for instance, “ne vivre que du vent” is at the basis of a whole series of comments, names, expressions, and anecdotes, that all have to do with winds, enough to fill the entire two-chapter episode of Ruach. The biblical expression “parler en l’air”32 (literally and figuratively: “talking in the air”), given at the opening of the episode of the frozen words, engenders a whole series of other expressions on words, all taken literally and figuratively at the same time: “mots de gueule” (a pun on “gueule” [“mouth”] and “gueules” [“red” in heraldic terminology]), “donner paroles” (“to promise,” “to deceive”), “vendre paroles” (“to sell words,” like an advocate does) “prendre un homme au mot” (“to take a man by his word”), “paroles volantes” (“winged words,” i.e., the words of Homer), “paroles piquantes, paroles sanglantes” (literally “sharp and bloody words”), and so forth. This episode seems to formulate a metalinguistic moral. It is one of the sole moments the narrator acts as a character. He asks his master Pantagruel’s permission to preserve in oil some motz de gueule. The giant refuses, “disant estre follie faire reserve de ce dont jamais l’on n’a faulte, et que tous jours on a en main, comme sont motz de gueule entre tous bons et joyeux Pantagruelistes” (ql 56, 670–671; cw 559). There is no consensus on the interpretation of this moral: is it about the free word versus the censured, frozen word? Is it against the written language in favor of the spoken word? Or, is it (as I believe it is) a plea in favor of inspired and spontaneous speaking and writing, against laborious, uninspired language of which the negatively connoted oil is the symbol, one that Rabelais has also used elsewhere, especially in his prologue to Gargantua?33 Omnipresent in Rabelais’s thinking about language is the notion of polysemy. The 1552 prologue gives the reader a lesson in ambiguity: Priapus, “le roydde Dieu des jardins,” gives the reader a course in discovering and using linguistic polysemy in his glossing of the word “coignée”: “je notay que ceste diction, coignee est equivocque a plusieurs choses” (ql, prol., 530; cw 431). However, this lesson is comically ambivalent because both teacher and lesson are extremely scabrous.

32 33

1 Corinthians 14:9. For the historical-philosophical background of Rabelais’s linguistic reflection, including cratylism, see Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris: 1992), and Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: 1979), 377–461.

interpreting the quart livre

9

351

Scholarship

Since the 1970s there has been a growing amount of publications on the Quart Livre, of which I pass in revue the most significant ones. The Quart Livre has been addressed by three book-long monographs: the above-discussed study by Edwin Duval, a study by Alicia Berry, and my own. In her The Charm of Catastrophe (2000)34 Berry interprets the Quart Livre as an initiatory journey. This is an interpretation she had already formulated in an earlier work of hers: Rabelais: Homo logos (1979). According to Berry, the final chapter of the Quart Livre can be read as a summary of the initiatory process Panurge is going through, and seems to announce the quest of the Cinquiesme Livre: The geometry of the initiatory voyage, and its main symbolism are complete in miniature: the descent downward to the heart of darkness, the symbolic death, the renewal and final rebirth in wine. In the Quart Livre also, Panurge is cleansed after his ordeal and sent to “prendre chemise blanche”, much as the underground voyagers in Le Cinquiesme Livre are clothed in white as a sign of their initiation.35 In my own study, Voyage et écriture, I try to specify this initiatory theme by showing that the final episode rewrites an early Christian baptismal ritual, just as the banquet on sea of the previous episode can be seen as a rewrite of the Eucharist. This interpretation links with interpretations by V.-L. Saulnier and Duval. In her Pléiade edition Mireille Huchon points out some specific references to Orphic initiation rites, and to the context of alchemy. Many critics, including M.A. Screech and, recently, Romain Menini, have stressed the presence of Plutarch’s works on initiation rites: On Isis and Osiris and On the Decline of Oracles,36 to which one can add Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, as well as the above-mentioned Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. There is, however, a double difficulty in interpreting the wider topic of initiation in the Quart Livre: first, the theme of initiation is at least partly veiled, for its matter is by definition secret, destined only for the initiated reader; second, the demarcation line between seriousness and comic parody is diffuse and difficult to define.

34 35 36

Alice Fiola Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe: A Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre (Chapel Hill: 2000). Berry, Rabelais: Homo logos (Chapel Hill: 1979), 120. Menini, Rabelais altérateur, 745–952.

352

smith

Following a positivist approach to literature, Abel Lefranc was looking for the reality “behind the myth.”37 He pointed out the Arctic Seas as the place of the Quart Livre’s navigation. Although Lefranc’s approach is singularly limited to Cartier’s voyages and their historical context, it opened the way to the study of Rabelais’s rewriting of a large corpus of cosmographical texts. From 1988 to the present, Frank Lestringant has published extensively on this topic.38 In reaction to Lefranc’s positivism, the Russian scholar and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin developed his theories about Carnival and its subversive impact, in which the low is elevated and the high is degraded. The carnivalesque reversal is particularly visible in the episode of the Chiquanous, with its recurrent theme of the enthroned and dethroned king. Bakhtin’s focus is on the regenerative power of man’s lower functions: stools, excrement, intestinal winds, and sexual activities. As we saw with Panurge in the final episode, his defecation is followed by regeneration and rebirth. The book’s lower topics— including Panurge’s bawdy eroticism and scatological poetry (ql 44, 640; cw 532)—sharply contrast with the spiritual elevation of other episodes. It is, however, curious that Bakhtin only superficially addressed the Carnival theme in the Quart Livre. For a fuller discussion of the theme in the Quart Livre, Samuel Kinser’s Rabelais’s Carnival is indispensable.39 The historical side and especially the theological side of the book are extensively covered by V.-L. Saulnier and Gérard Defaux, albeit with clear mutual differences. According to Saulnier, Rabelais conceals his message in a way typical of the muzzled Evangelism of that time, labelled by Saulnier as “hésuchisme” (from the Greek hesuchos, silent).40 For Gérard Defaux, on the contrary, Rabelais is driven by an intense hatred for papal Rome.41 According to Defaux, this hatred is omnipresent in the Quart Livre, especially in the final episode: that involving Ganabin, the island of robbers, for which the “hault rochier à deux croupes” should refer to the Capitol of Rome. In various overview works on Rabelais, the Quart Livre has received much attention. These works include, for French-language criticism, those by Guy

37 38 39 40 41

Abel Lefranc, Les navigations de Pantagruel: Étude sur la géographie rabelaisienne (Paris: 1904). Lestringant, “L’ insulaire de Rabelais.” Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: 1990). Verdun-Louis Saulnier, Rabelais ii. Rabelais dans son enquête: Étude sur le Quart et le Cinquième Livre (Paris: 1982). Gérard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophète. Études sur Pantagruel, Gargantua et Le Quart Livre, (er) 32 (Geneva: 1997).

interpreting the quart livre

353

Demerson and Daniel Ménager.42 In the English-language field the works by Donald Frame and Jerome Schwartz are still useful.43 Of all the overview works, M.A. Screech’s Rabelais furnishes the most comprehensive, complete, and erudite information, with special attention given to the works’ theological and political-historical background. For Rabelais’s life at the time of the Quart Livre the biography by Mireille Huchon is essential reading. Enlightening are some more general works on 16th-century history and religion in which the Quart Livre is allotted a place, especially the studies by Lucien Febvre and Thierry Wanegffelen.44 In his book on Rabelaisian satire, Bernd Renner devotes several chapters to the Quart Livre, not only about what is satirized, but also how Rabelaisian satire functions literarily.45 Another approach—one employed especially since the 1970s—which reacts against Lefranc’s positivism is a stylistic-literary one (in the wake of Leo Spitzer), focusing on linguistic polysemy and ambiguity, and the literary processing of the comic in the Quart Livre. This approach includes works by Floyd Gray,46 François Rigolot,47 Terence Cave,48 and Barbara Bowen.49 On the literary imagination of the monstrous in the Quart Livre, Michel Jeanneret, and more recently, Wes Williams, have written insightful pages.50 There exist many interpretations of individual episodes. Often these interpretations are not mutually exclusive, but they add a new semantic layer to the already known polysemic layering of the Rabelaisian text. A good example of multiple semantic layering and extreme semantic density is the episode of the Andouilles. In an article about this episode Florence Weinberg first gives a

42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50

Guy Demerson, François Rabelais (Paris: 1991) (and other works); Daniel Ménager, Rabelais en toutes lettres (Paris: 1989). Frame, François Rabelais; Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion (Cambridge: 2009). Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’ incroyance au xvie siècle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris: 1942); and Thierry Wanegffelen, Une difficile fidélité: Catholiques malgré le concile en France. xvie–xviie siècles (Paris: 1999). Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007). Floyd Gray, Rabelais et l’ écriture (Paris: 1974). François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: 1972), and numerous publications since. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: 1979). Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Nashville-London: 1998). Michel Jeanneret, Le défi des signes: Rabelais et la crise de l’interprétation à la Renaissance (Orléans: 1994); Wes Williams, Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic (Oxford: 2012).

354

smith

quick overview of the four different signifying layers, then she comes out with her own interpretation: The Andouilles of the Quart Livre are emblematic, signifying on at least five levels: (1) Andouilles are literally, tripe sausages; (2) visually, they resemble phalluses, eels, small sinuous animals; (3) politically, and historically, they are a metaphor for the Protestant allies during the Schmalkaldic War—the Andouilles specifically are Lutherans; (4) mythically and epically, their behaviour is reminiscent of ancient Greeks or Roman war councils; the “truye” is a parody of the Trojan Horse; (5) on the religious level, Pantagruel’s banquet (= mass) offends the Andouilles, who attack. The flying hog who halts the battle, founder and protector of the Andouillic race, is an avatar of Luther.51 On the basis of this overview, one can categorize the numerous studies that have appeared on the episode. The “literal” meaning, where the sausages are seen as sausages, makes it possible to apply an interpretation à la Bakhtin or Kinser: the episode is about Carnival, in which the Andouilles stand for the Fat Kitchen of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) and their opponent Quaresmeprenant for the Lean Kitchen of Lent. The different meanings of the second layer of significance are the basis of some studies on the gender theme of this episode (Barbara Bowen, Françoise Charpentier, and Gisèle Matthieu-Castellani).52 The third layer of significance is political-allegorical: Quaresmeprenant symbolizes Charles v, the Council of Chesil is the Council of Trent, the “Boudins saulvaiges” and the “Saulcissons montigenes” can be interpreted, ever since an article by Alban Krailsheimer,53 very precisely as the Protestants of the Black Forest and certain Swiss cantons (followers of Bucer and Zwingli). The fourth layer is that of the literary parody on Homer (the Trojan horse) and some other authors. The fifth layer includes the contribution of Weinberg herself: the banquet of the Pantagruelists is to be interpreted as the Erasmian version of the Catholic mass, and the flying pig stands for Luther. Other layers can be added to the episode’s

51 52

53

Florence Weinberg, “Layers of Emblematic Prose: Rabelais’ Andouilles,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 26 (1995): 367–377 (367). B. Bowen, “Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages,” L’ esprit créateur 21 (1981): 12–25; Françoise Charpentier, “La guerre des Andouilles: Pantagruel iv, 35–42,” in Etudes seiziémistes offertes à Monsieur le Professeur V.L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1980), 119–135; Gisèle MathieuCastellani, “Bisexualité et animalité fabuleuse,” Corps écrit 6 (1983): 159–169. Alban Krailsheimer, “The Andouilles of the Quart Livre,” in François Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième anniversaire de sa mort, 1553–1953 (Geneva: 1953), 226–232.

interpreting the quart livre

355

file.54 A similar analysis can be made for all other episodes of the Quart Livre, each episode having its own file. For an overview of Rabelaisian criticism up to 2006 I refer to the indispensable commented bibliography by Guy Demerson and Myriam Marrache-Gouraud (2010).55 In 2012, the Quart Livre was included on the list of books prescribed for the agrégation in France: this led to the publication of three volumes with new interpretations of individual chapters and specific topics.56 In the same context two excellent French introductions to the Quart Livre were published, giving references to the most recent literature.57

10

By Way of Conclusion

As is evidenced by the present article, much remains unclear in the Quart Livre. Even intensively studied episodes refuse to reveal all their secrets. Moreover, the more they are scrutinized, the more their aporetic nature becomes apparent. We have noticed numerous instances of this. A further and most embarrassing example can be found at the end of the episode of the Macraeons: Pantagruel, remembering Christ’s death, weeps—the sole moment in the Quart Livre where the giant sheds tears: Pantagruel ce propous finy resta en silence et profonde contemplation. Peu de temps après nous veismes les larmes decouller de ses œilz grosses comme œufz de Austruche. Je me donne à Dieu, si j’ en mens d’ un seul mot. ql 28, 605; cw 498

54

55 56

57

According to my own interpretation, the episode should be read as virulent anti-English satire. See Smith, “ ‘Les âmes anglaises sont andouillettes’: Nouvelles perspectives sur l’ épisode des Andouilles (Quart Livre, ch. 35–42),” in Rabelais et la question du sens. Actes du colloque international de Cerisy-La-Salle, août 2000, eds. J. Céard and M.-L. Demonet, (er) 56 (Geneva: 2011), 99–111. See also the recent article by Le Cadet, “La guerre des Andouilles farfelues et l’ archipel du Quart Livre (35 à 42),” in Un Joyeux Quart de sentences, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget, (er) 56 (Geneva: 2017), 35–50. Guy Demerson and Myriam Marrache-Gouraud (eds.), François Rabelais (Bibliographie des écrivains français) 32 (Rome-Paris: 2010). Nathalie Dauvois and Jean Vignes (eds.), En relisant le Quart Livre de Rabelais; Demonet and Geonget (eds.), Un Joyeux Quart de sentences; Franco Giacone (ed.), Langue et sens du Quart Livre (Paris: 2012). Le Cadet and Halévy, Rabelais: Quart Livre; Marrache-Gouraud (ed.), Rabelais, aux confins des mondes possibles (Paris: 2011).

356

smith

This solemn moment is subverted. Pantagruel’s tears are comically compared to ostrich eggs, and the narrator’s insistence on the veracity of his story reminds the reader that he is reading a liar’s tale. As so often happens, the reader finds himself mirrored in the book’s characters, tirelessly interpreting and deciphering the world they pass through. The insoluble paradoxes of the book ascertain that the reader’s interpretative quest has no end.

chapter 14

The Fifth and Last Book (1564) Gérard Milhe Poutingon

In 1562, a decade or so after the death of Rabelais, a short and violently satirical work, by the name of The Ringing Island [L’Isle sonante] was put into circulation. Two years later a newly modified version was on sale. This new version comprised a prologue and forty-eight chapters entitled: The Fifth and Last Book of the Heroic Deeds and Sayings of the Good Pantagruel, composed by M. François Rabelais, Doctor of Medicine [Le Cinquiesme et dernier livre des faicts et dicts Heroïques du bon Pantagruel, composé par M. François Rabelais, Docteur en Medecine]. This work, though of doubtful authenticity,1 was put into the public domain by a medical doctor, Jean Turquet de Mayerne, who reveals his identity in a quatrain signed in an anagram of his name: “Nature Quite.” The book is made up, in part, of authentic texts2 and other texts originating from diverse sources, such as draft copies published elsewhere by Rabelais after amendments,3 prolongations of reflections embarked upon in preceding works,4 notes taken whilst reading a range of other authors.5 The Fifth and Last Book is notably made up of unauthentic passages of typically longer length, which amalgamate the various draft copies into chapters, whilst infiltrating into the text probable elements of pastiche thereby imitating the true Rabelaisian style.6 Besides this problem of The Fifth and Last Book’s authen1 On the question of authenticity, see Mireille Huchon, Rabelais. Œuvres complètes, 1595–1607, her Rabelais grammairien De l’ histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité, (er) 16 (Geneva: 1981), and Franco Giacone (ed.), Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001). 2 I revisit the classification of various aspects of the text defined by Marie Madeleine Fontaine in her analysis of the “système des références dans le Cinquiesme Livre,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, 501–552. 3 For example, the prologue of The Fifth and Last Book is the first version of the prologue of The Third Book. 4 The episode of Odes (ch. 25), notably, would appear to be revealed in the prolongation of The Fourth Book. 5 Chapter 9 of The Island of Ironware revisits and amplifies certain elements from chapters. 23 and 24 of the Disciple de Pantagruel (1538). 6 This is the case in the chapter on the island of the Apedeftes (see Huchon, Rabelais grammairien, 457). This episode of The Ringing Island is absent from The Fifth and Last Book. However, as M.M. Fontaine remarks, “it is highly probable that the incidence in the chapter

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_016

358

milhe poutingon

ticity, there is also the additional problem of its coherence: we have in our hands a book which is not only heterogeneous, but also polyphonic, written or embellished by one or many contributors. How is this hybrid text situated with respect to Rabelais’s works as a whole? Some experts refuse to take account of it, whilst other experts consider that it conforms with the author’s overall project. I will not offer a reply to this question but will rather attempt the more modest objective of expanding the great themes of this book by confronting them with other Rabelaisian works. Two main thematic orientations stand out. Firstly, the satirical attacks against certain institutions. The Ringing Island is a harsh (“virulent,” says Mireille Huchon7) work, an attack against that which might have aroused Rabelais’s indignation, particularly concerning religion. Its publication took place during a period of heightened religious tension. It is evident that such publications were made possible due to supporters of reformed thinking, such as Cardinal Odet de Châtillon, who was Rabelais’s protector, and himself a convert to Calvinism in 1561. When The Fifth and Last Book was put into circulation, the tensions were to some extent pacified, but in all probability those writers who continued to develop Rabelais’s work after his death had the intention of employing his texts in order to participate in the lively debates which were ongoing at that time. Secondly, about half the book is devoted to esotericism, particularly alchemy. Jean de Mayerne was involved, by way of his friends and family, with the followers of Paracelcus.8 The question therefore arises whether The Fifth and Last Book does not also play a part in the diffusion (so important, particularly in the second half of the 16th century) of the principles and practices of alchemy. This question evokes the need to scrutinize The Fifth and Last Book’s connections to some of the wider characteristics of 16th-century thought.

1

Satirical Violence

From the outset, The Fifth and Last Book does not disappoint its readers, as it plunges them straight into the next instalment of the voyage upon which the

on Apedeftes is not the only one” (“il est très probable que le cas du chapitre des Apedeftes n’ est pas isolé.”). 7 Rabelais (Paris: 2011), 362. The following remarks concerning the context of the publication of The Fifth and Last Book are hers. 8 Didier Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (Geneva: 2007), 358–359.

the fifth and last book (1564)

359

Pantagruelists have embarked, in order to consult the oracle of the “Divine Bottle.” The voyage having been instigated at the end of The Third Book, its story is then driven along throughout The Fourth Book. This fifth book follows the codes of the preceding one: it recounts an overseas voyage, where the ports of call nearly always become the scene for a violently satirical discourse.9 At the end of Pantagruel,10 Alcofribas (the narrator and character behind whom Rabelais hides whilst signing his first two books) defends himself against his readers who accuse him of lacking in wisdom by writing such purposeless and uninteresting books; however, the readers haven’t been wise either, for they have wasted their time by reading them!11 Thus Alcofribas comically points out to the readers their own faults, before alerting them to the “Hypocrites.” This declaration ushers in that which Rabelais suggests in the prologue of The Fourth Book, namely, when he exposes some individuals guilty of revealing the errors of their contemporaries; such errors as they have nevertheless committed themselves. He “reveres” the Gospel, in which it is said, with horrible sarcasm and biting derision, to a doctor negligent of his own health: “Physician, heal thyself” (Luke 4:23).12 The dictum of Christ, Medice cura te ipsum, signifies that one must require of oneself that which one expects of others. On the contrary, those individuals ready to draw attention to the “straw” in the eyes of those around them without seeing the “plank” in their own eyes (this is the proposition of Saint Luke13 cited by Rabelais in The Third Book) are hypocrites, who only deserve “sarcasms.” Rabelais evokes the example of Galen, who was afraid of “falling prey to this vulgar and satiric mockery.”14 The latter terms are explained in The Brief Declaration.15 The “sarcasm” is therein defined as a “stinging, bitter mockery,” the “satiric mockery” as a “way to speak ill of each and every one at will, and to blazon [expose] vices.”16 Rabelaisian satire is thus focused on “vices,” moral shortcomings which render the whole of humanity guilty. By drawing

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

See Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007). At least from the 1534 edition onwards. cw, 244; P 33, 244–245. cw, 425; ql Prologue, 523: “Je revere la sacrosaincte parolle de bonnes nouvelles, c’est l’ Evangile, on quel est dict Luc. 4. en horrible sarcasme et sanglante derision au medicin negligent de sa propre santé: Medicin, O, gueriz toymesmes.” Luke 6:42. cw, 425; ql Prologue, 523. A short dictionary of sorts published at the end of The Fourth Book. It is usually believed that Rabelais is the author. cw, 594; ql Briefve declaration, 704.

360

milhe poutingon

parallels between the end of Pantagruel and the ideas in The Fourth Book, it is even possible to identify a particular vice: Philautie, the vain love of oneself.17 The self-centered “philaute” sees in others the faults he does not see in himself. The vice of Philautie, according to Christian humanism, is the enemy of charity, for he who loves himself to excess forgets to give of himself to others. The Fifth and Last Book can also be read as a “stinging, bitter mockery” directed against all sorts of vice. In this way the Church of Rome and the judiciary become the preferred targets in the episodes of The Ringing Island and The Furred Cats. The religious satire conforms to the requirements of the sympathizers of the Reformed and Evangelical movements, by targeting the practice of fasting, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the moral standards of the papal court, the sale of relics, the monastic orders, etc. All in all, these themes appear in varying degrees in Rabelais’s other books. The criticism of the monastic orders by the evangelicals is constantly present in Rabelais’s works (notably in Gargantua), and figures in the episode of The Semiquaver Friars (chapters 26 to 28). In those chapters, some of the most important ideas in The Fourth Book are to be found, for example the disclosure of the moral standards of the papal court where richness of all kinds is abundant (chapter 6), and where all sorts of favoritism are common practice (chapter 8). The criticism of fasting plays an important role: it starts already in chapter 1 and is reiterated in chapter 28 (“how Epistémon dislikes the institution of Lent”). Some groups, in particular the protestants, judged as useless those pious deeds thought to accumulate merit (before God), such as fasting, which if practiced to excess, needlessly ruins the health; Rabelais not only speaks the language of Christianity, but also that of medicine. In The Fifth and Last Book, the representatives of the Church and the courts are depicted as birds or cats, “mighty horrible, frightful beasts.”18 Rabelais takes up a comparison from Erasmus, who draws a parallel between monks and birds. However, this satirical representation of people as animals can also be construed as once again picking up a theme from Gargantua. The young giant, badly educated by his mediocre teachers, does not manage to acquire humanitas, a virtue inherited from Latin antiquity, according to which an individual becomes human as a result of scholarly education consisting of that which was called in the 16th-century “Bonnes Lettres” (bonæ literæ). In De Pueris Instituendis, which Rabelais read closely while writing chapter 8 of Pantagruel, Erasmus (inspired by Cicero19) expresses the belief that a person devoid of this 17 18 19

cw, 347; tl 29, 444. See Michael A. Screech, Rabelais (Paris: 1992), 290. cw, 634; cl 11, 749. De Officiis, i, 16, 50.

the fifth and last book (1564)

361

humanity is “inferior to beasts.” The absence of humanity is a kind of beastliness. In chapter 15 of Gargantua the young giant, realizing his incapacity to pit himself against an erudite page boy, “started crying like a cow” and stayed silent like “a dead donkey.” These comparisons evoke the pupil’s beastliness, who is driven “crazy, stupid, all dreamy and idiotic” by the calamitous teachings of two “sophists,” themselves incapable of instilling humanity within him. In The Fifth and Last Book, the comical caricaturing of churchmen and judges as beasts probably builds on this concept. This beastliness is, among other things, true to the spirit of The Fourth Book. During their voyage, the Pantagruelists encounter societies whose members are the incarnation of certain vices. The sign of their negativity is their monstrosity: these are “monsters deformed and misshapen in despite of Nature.”20 Similarly, in The Fifth and Last Book, the characters are confronted with monsters, for example the “ironware” (“monstrosities”21). However, it is above all the “hideous and monstrous”22 birds of the Ringing Island, who “had twisted necks and hairy paws, the talons and bellies of Harpies, and asses like the Stymphalids,” or else the Furred Cats (“Their body hair does not grow outward, but is hidden inside”23) which reveal this allegorical monstrosity. Rabelais’s criticism against them is generally on the level of “sarcasm,” that’s to say, a form of literal irony: when he says the Furred Cats “burn, explode, decapitate, maim, imprison,” etc., the denunciation is explicit, because in reality that is what judges actually do. Rabelaisian irony can also be based upon antiphrasis. In this case, it is no longer literal but figurative (the usual way in which irony is conceived). There is an example of this where the Semiquaver Friars, who on a daily basis “attendant le jugement final s’exerçoient à œuvre de charité.”24 These monks certainly practice charity, but only in an absurd way: The rest of the day, tweaking one another’s noses; on Tuesday, scratching one another; on Wednesday, blowing one another’s noses; on Thursday, pulling worms out of one another’s noses; on Friday, tickling one another; on Saturday, whipping one another.25

20 21 22 23 24 25

cw, 507; ql 32, 615. cw, 632; cl 10, 748. cw, 618; cl 3. cw, 634; cl 11, 750. Sentence not translated by Frame (“While waiting for the final judgement they practiced charity.”). cw 670; cl 26, 791.

362

milhe poutingon

The virtue of charity implies that people should love one another, each in their turn. In the above case, the ideal of reciprocity is respected, but it is applied to stupid or even aggressive actions, with no connection to love whatsoever. The objective of Rabelais’s irony is to identify and name by antiphrasis “charity” that which is only a caricature of charity. This form of irony is often employed by the Pantagruelists themselves, who do not hesitate to mock any example of vice which crosses their path. At the end of chapter 6, whilst invoking charity, Aeditue explains that because members of the clergy live very well on earth, they will live even better in heaven. Thus, he inverses the precept according to which the first in this world will be last in heaven.26 Such propositions are echoed in chapter 30 of Pantagruel, which is given over to this evangelical lesson, as well as the episode in The Fourth Book in which the despicable Homenaz holds that in order “to be infallibly saved in the Blessed Kingdom of Heaven,” one needs to be “rich and honored in this world.”27 The Pantagruelists pretend to agree with Homenaz. In reality, they ridicule this “Papimaniac,” who is so stupid that he is incapable of understanding that his visitors are mocking him. The same irony is put into play by Panurge et Alcofribas, who pretend to agree with Aeditue, whilst Pantagruel remains silent “and wore a gloomy look”28 when confronted with the detestable way of life of the churchmen in the Ringing Island. The Fifth and Last Book broadly takes up again the themes of The Fourth Book, and its techniques of mockery. In particular, Rabelais resorts to scatological references. The monk-birds “farted,” they had “befouled and beshitten the whole Island.” Before the monstrosity of these creatures, Pantagruel’s reaction is to laugh with such great gusto that he breaks wind loudly, “for lack of skin.”29 In Gargantua (chapter 17), the giant urinates on the vain Parisians in order to punish them for their ridiculous vanity. The fart, the urine, etc. are appropriate responses to such moral errors: it is a matter of ridiculing them by treating them with the derision they deserve. In The Fourth Book, one of Rabelais’s objectives is to trace the sources of evil. He employs terms (by applying them to vice) which refer back to the notion of “original model”: Archetype, Idea. Homenaz, the fanatic “Papimaniac,” shows

26 27 28 29

Matt. 20:16; Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30. cw, 555; ql 53, 665. cw, 623; cl 6, 738. cw, 618; cl 2, 732. Thus, this is the least which we can interpret from the reference to Priapus and his “lack of skin”: in the Praise of Folly (Chapter 54), Erasmus explains in this way, Priapus’ misadventure.

the fifth and last book (1564)

363

the Pantagruelists the portrait of the Pope, labelled as “archetype of a pope.”30 The Brief Declaration indicates that the word archetype signifies “original” and “portrait.” These notions were often employed at that time to draw attention to, and name, the models to copy.31 One might think of the terms employed by Barthélemy Aneau to describe Thomas More’s Utopia.32 According to Aneau, this work is a philosophical reflection, in the form of a tale, on the subject of how the perfect republic or state should be. Thomas More offers us, says Aneau, a model of the ideal society, “a perfect Archetype” (“un Archetype parfait”) to pursue.33 Rabelais, in The Fourth Book, also shows us some “Archetypes,” but this time of Evil, in order to propose a sort of “counter-Utopia,” an assortment of perverted societies which merit destruction of their foundations. This destruction is sometimes literal: Pantagruel kills the “monstrous physeter,” his troops massacre the not less monstrous “Chitterlings.” But, overall, evil is destroyed by means of irony and laughter. The Fifth and Last Book continues this objective. It is even in The Fifth and Last Book that the clearest allusion to the idea that the counter-Utopia must be destroyed is made. Frère Jean, angry after visiting the land of Furred Cats, brings to mind for the benefit of his companions the example of Hercules who, “wandering about in the world, set people free from tyranny, from error, dangers, and drudgery.” Like this mythical hero who “put to death all the brigands, all the monsters, all the venomous serpents and harmful animals,” he invites his companions “to sack the Furred Cats.” The allegorical impact of the monk’s dicta appear forthwith: “Why don’t we follow his example and do as he did in all the regions we pass through?”34 This idea is also developed in chapter 2. Meditating upon the monstrosity of the creatures of the Ringing Island, Alcofribas declares: “I was wishing they had some second Hercules there,” before indicating that Pantagruel’s reaction was to “fart” with laughter. Thus, the role of the Rabelaisian heroes is to combat evil and error with violence and laughter. In the case of a writer, whose only weapon is language, the purifying force, by nature heroic and Herculean, of Frère Jean, shows itself in the form of harshly comical writing.

30 31 32

33 34

cw, 544; ql 50, 654. See, for example, Guillaume Paradin, Chronique de Savoye (Lyon: 1561), 302. It is evident that Rabelais knew Utopia (1516). In Pantagruel, it is the name of the country of giants. In The Fourth Book, the name of the Island of Medamothi means “nowhere” (see cw, 1016). “Advertissement déclaratif de l’ œuvre,” in La Republicque d’Utopie par Thomas Maure (Lyon: 1559), 6. cw, 642; cl 15, 759.

364 2

milhe poutingon

Esotericism

We have so far established how The Fifth and Last Book is positioned with respect to Rabelais’s other works, in particular The Fourth Book, which is also characterized by its satirical violence against the isolated populations which are the very incarnation of “vices.” However, this book also has some particularities. Notably, The Fifth and Last Book stands out in this respect: the quest of the Pantagruelists is given an explicit end, whereas The Fourth Book offers a less clear, more allusive finish. In the latter the maritime voyage is interrupted whilst at sea by the enigmatic speech held by Panurge. In The Fifth and Last Book, this voyage ends in the temple of the “Divine Bottle,” by a long episode (chapters 33 to 47)35 describing the initiation of Panurge, guided by the “the pontiff Bacbuc” (the priestess of the temple) towards a “Truth.” In addition to this initiation to the Divine Bottle, there is a detour to visit the queen of alchemy, whose name is “Quint Essence” (chapters 18 to 24). Twentythree chapters out of forty-seven are therefore given over to the treatment of esotericism. The importance given to this form of thought is one of the most remarkable traits of The Fifth and Last Book when compared to Rabelais’s other works. The truth into which Panurge is initiated is announced by “the saying” inscribed on the gates of the temple of the Dive: “en vin verité” (“in wine is truth”).36 It is then recalled by Bacbuc: “in wine truth is hidden.”37 Beforehand, the “Divine Bottle,” once broken, would utter the word “Trinch.” The wisdom which Panurge is seeking at the end of his quest is therefore associated with wine. Wine is undeniably one of the most important themes in the works of Rabelais. It is also the theme which is perhaps the most misunderstood by the wider public, who often stereotype Rabelais as a drunken poet, and even as a promulgator of drunkenness. In opposition to this false impression, we might recall that in Gargantua it is when the young giant is under the constant influence of his mad teachers that he incessantly eats and drinks.38 On the contrary, when the giant benefits from the teaching of the sage Ponocrates, he gives up

35 36

37 38

Apart from the editions of The Fifth and Last Book and of The Ringing Island, there exists an unsigned manuscript, in which the final chapter is much more developed. cw, 690; cl 36, 814. For remarks about wine in The Fifth and Last Book, see Guy Demerson, “Trinch ou les hiéroglyphes de la boisson,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, 127–146. cw, 710; cl 45, 834. cw, 50; G 22, 63.

the fifth and last book (1564)

365

this “loose mode of life,” only taking his place at the table “at an opportune moment,” that is to say when “Sir Appetite came.”39 One only takes one’s place at the table therefore, if it is to satisfy one’s hunger, not one’s gluttony. If there is some wine on the table, one must take also some water (“bread, water, salt, the meats, fish, fruits, herbs, roots”). It is very apparent that there are numerous passages showing that drunkenness is symbolic of negative characters. No sooner than they have arrived on the Isle of the “Divine Bottle,” the Pantagruelists are required to dress in clothes symbolizing their disdain for drunkenness, because it inhibits the “contemplation of divine things.”40 However, wine is most definitely celebrated by Rabelais, above all for its ability to draw people together. The companions come together full of joy, to drink amongst friends and engage in pleasant conversation.41 This convivial custom of sharing wine is frequently employed, notably in the last words of the prologue of Gargantua: “vous soubvienne de boyre à my pour la pareille: et je vous plegerai tout ares metys” (“remember to drink to me in return, and I’ll drink to you all on the spot”).42 Plegier, or pleger, signifies “drink to the health of those who drink to yours” and therefore supposes reciprocal action. This custom appears, above all, at the end of the prologue of The Third Book, where Rabelais “invites” us to drink (he uses the verb “trinquer”) with him in complete freedom. The verb trinquer is important. At its origin, it signifies simply “to drink.” Subsequently it took on the meaning: “to drink in company.” The dictionaries generally attribute this sense to the word from the 17th century onwards. In fact, this interpretation appears in the 16th century. For example, Henri Estienne considers the phrases “je vous porte ce verre, je vous ferai raison” are incorrect in French. He prefers to put it this way: “je vous plegerai […], trinquer et faire brindes.”43 Estienne puts on the same level the verb trinquer and expressions signifying the act of drinking together ( faire brindes, like pleger, signifies “drink to the health of someone”). At the end of The Fifth and Last Book, after having been uttered by the Divine Bottle then commented upon by Bacbuc, the word “Trinch” is repeated over and over again by Pantagruel (“Trinch doncques” [“So trench”]), then by Panurge (“Trinquons” [“Let’s trench”]), and finally by Frère Jean (“Trinqueur” [“trencher”]). These variations upon the word of the Bottle form the final resounding echoes of numerous invitations to gather together over wine. 39 40 41 42 43

cw, 56; G 23, 66. cw, 686; cl 33, 809. See for example the banquet on the Thalamège, last chapters of The Fourth Book. cw, 5; G Prologue, 8. Deux dialogues du nouveau langage françois italianizé (Antwerp: 1579), 421.

366

milhe poutingon

Rabelais’s preceding works are littered with such invitations. For him, it is less important to drink than to “trinquer.” Or, to put it another way, wine is a way of uniting people. Consequently, wine plays a role in the Rabelaisian conception of ethics, based upon charity: each citizen must prove his usefulness, being helpful towards his neighbor, with whom he has fellowship. It is at the end of The Fifth and Last Book that we are treated to the clearest construction of this idea. The unifying function of wine is therein exposed in many ways. For example, before expounding his eulogy of wine, Bacbuc reminds the Pantagruelists that people form a chain of humanity: For, as Aesop’s fable has it, all humans are born with a wallet around their neck, needy by nature and begging from one another. There is no king so powerful that he can get along without others; there is no poor man so independent who can do without the rich man.44 Aesop’s fable, The Two Bags, is in this case an allegory of charitable mutual help.45 Thus the act of drinking, according to Bacbuc, is even more necessary to men than the “sack”: “Even less can you do without drinking than you can [do] without a sack [or wallet]. Therefore, we maintain that not by laughing but by drinking does man distinguish himself” (“Et icy maintenons que non rire, ains boire est le propre de l’homme”). Rabelais replaces this famous affirmation of the opinion of the readers of Gargantua (“It is laughter that becomes man best” [“Rire est le propre de l’homme”])46 by a celebration of the union of people by means of shared wine. The “pontiff” points out, among other things, that the word “Trinch” is “understood by all nations,” meaning that, by overcoming the curse of Babel, it reunites people. The initiation into the truth about wine entails many allusions to charity. Some of them are comical, as is, for example, the poem of Frère Jean who, following the example of his companions full of “poetic frenzy” after having listened to Bacbuc, declares: “God the Father, God paternal, / Who turned water into wine, / Make my ass, pray, more lanternal, / For my neighbor let it shine.”47 Frère Jean wishes that his “ass,” having undergone a miraculous transformation 44 45

46 47

cw, 710; cl 45, 834. Rabelais modified the sense of this apologue, which in general is interpreted like an allegory of philautia. See Françoise Giordani, “Les tribulations d’une besace,” in Poétique et narration. Mélanges offerts à Guy Demerson, eds. F. Marotin and J.-P. Saint-Gérand (Paris: 1993), 393–405. For an analysis of this replacement of laughing by wine, see Daniel Ménager, La Renaissance et le rire (Paris: 1995), 110–111. cw, 712; cl 46, 836.

the fifth and last book (1564)

367

similar to that which turned water into wine at the wedding of Cana, might have a useful function: to enlighten humanity in the darkness. It should be noted that in her eulogy of wine, Bacbuc speaks about the etymology of the word wine, “oinos in Greek,” a word signifying “strength, power.” This etymological discussion (originated in Plato’s Cratylus), like many other elements in this episode, is probably inspired by a passage from Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistæ.48 Now, this reference tells us that one of the etymological possibilities of the Greek word meaning “wine” is oνησις, “usefulness or utility.” Other references to charity are more explicit. Whilst leaving the Pantagruelists, Bacbuc finds the “the sovereign good” in “handing out and giving,” citing The Acts of the Apostles (20:35). Then, her last words proclaim the necessity, for any person desiring to attain the truth, to first of all seek friendship: For all ancient philosophers and sages, for the sure and pleasant completion of the road to divine knowledge and the pursuit of wisdom, have considered two things necessary: guidance of God and company of man.49 Following a long list of famous examples of friendships which inspired the friendship of Pantagruel and Panurge,50 it is probable that Rabelais had in mind the doctrine of Saint Augustine, who maintained that friendship blossoms between individuals as a result of charity.51 We should also consider the lesson of the “Trinch.” According to Bacbuc, this word signifies that Panurge must find his own truth from within himself: “you yourselves be the interpreters of your own undertaking.”52 This lesson repeats the advice that Pantagruel gave to his friend in chapter 29 of The Third Book.53 Panurge must read his own heart. Or to put it another way, he must learn the lesson of Socrates: know thyself. According to Christian thought of that epoch, nosce te ipsum was associated with charity. For it is by knowing himself that the individual becomes conscious of his dignity. This then enables him to take stock of the link which joins him to others, in this vast chain of humanity in

48 49 50 51

52 53

Deipnosophistæ, ii. cw, 716; cl 47, 840. See Pantagruel, chapter 9. Confessions, iv, 4. Charity in Gargantua is situated under the double patronage of Saint Paul (motto of Gargantua, chapter 8) and Saint Augustine (motto of the Thelemites, chapter 57). cw, 710; cl 45, 834. “In the undertaking of marriage each man must be the arbiter of his own thoughts and take counsel of himself” (cw, 347; tl 29, 444).

368

milhe poutingon

which he is himself a link.54 Therefore, one of the upshots of the praise of wine and the act of toasting will be the celebration of the one who embodies the cement between people: the principle of love extolled by Christ. In The Fifth and Last Book, the moral virtues of wine form the subject of an esoteric initiation over which the shadow of Bacchus-Dionysus glides. This god is present at the entrance to the temple of Dive, where a complex mosaic (chapters 38 to 39) represents the conquest of India by Bacchus. It is through invoking Bacchus that Pantagruel subsequently invites Panurge to a toast: “So Trinch; what does your heart tell you when roused by Bacchic enthusiasm?”. “Let’s trinch, in the name of good old Bacchus,” replies a Panurge who has become, according to Frère Jean, “a fine trencher” through the influence of the “poetic frenzy from Bacchus.” The allusions are numerous, sometimes obvious, sometimes discreet. Thus, we can observe that Bacbuc does not praise any type of wine. After having declared that “not by laughing but by drinking does man distinguish himself,” she adds: “I don’t say drinking simply and absolutely in the strictest sense, for beasts drink as well a man, but I mean drinking cool, delicious wine” (“Je ne dy boire simplement et absolument, car aussi bien boivent les bestes: je dy boire vin bon et frais”). Rabelais insists on the idea that the wine must be cool (“frais”). Just before their initiation, the Pantagruelists swallow some water which is transformed into wine in their mouths, according to the “imagination” of each drinker. Pantagruel feels on his tongue a wine which is “cooler than ice,” resembling cold water springing up from various mythical sources.55 We might well ask if Rabelais is making an allusion to the necessity to use cool, chilled wine when making libations to the gods thereby following the specific advice of Plutarch.56 Moreover, the chilled water from “Derce,” to which Pantagruel compares the wine which flows over the tongue, is that from the spring in which Bacchus was bathed at birth. Rabelais has therefore placed the end of The Fifth and Last Book within the domain of the Dionysiac mysteries.57 That is not incompatible with the celebration of knowledge of oneself, and of charity. Firstly, because Rabelais describes “that good fellow Bacchus laughing, chortling, and drinking to everyone’s health”

54 55 56

57

See Etienne Gilson, L’ esprit de la philosophie médiévale (Paris: 1969), 222. cw, 704; cl 42, 829. Symposiacs, v, 4. See also the analysis by Alain Pasquier of the symbolic function of a psykter (a Greek vase equipped with a cooling channel for the wine) in the Louvre: “Un cratère-rafraîchissoir au musée du Louvre: Du vin frais pour un banquet de luxe,” Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot 78 (2000): 5–51. See Florence Weinberg, The Wine and the Will: Rabelais’s Bacchic Christianity (Detroit: 1972).

the fifth and last book (1564)

369

(“le bon homme Bacchus riant, se gaudissant et beuvant d’ autant à un chascun”)58 with the same words that he uses in the prologue of Gargantua to describe Socrates (“Tousjours riant, tousjours beuvant d’ autant à un chascun”), who was sometimes compared with Christ.59 Secondly, because it was normal practice in the 16th century to draw a parallel between Dionysus (who was tortured and burnt at the stake by the Titans then resurrected by Zeus) and Christ.

3

The Praise of Technology

In Rabelais’s era, “vin frais” (cool wine) is considered a refinement.60 In Gargantua, the tyrant Picrochole, envisaging his voyage to conquer the world, laments the possibility that he might die of thirst in the desert. But he laments more fervently the fact that he cannot drink “cool” wine, in other words, as his counsellors reproached him, that he might not have “his comforts.”61 If “trinquer” is a civilized act, drinking cool wine is therefore a sign of civilization. Actually, it is only the ingenuity of human beings which can keep the wine cool,62 whereas it would naturally be “chaud” (“hot”).63 Moreover, one of the ideas circulating at the time about wine is that it is not precipitated under normal conditions of nature: it is produced by “art,” implying technology.64 In the propositions of Bacbuc, which oppose the act of drinking cool wine and that of “drinking simply and absolutely in the strictest sense, for beasts drink as well” (“boire simplement et absolument, car aussi bien boivent les bestes”), we can recognize an allusion to the idea that the first drink ever was water, as opposed to wine, which is a product of agriculture and ingenuity.65 The fact of drink58 59 60

61 62

63 64 65

cw, 697; cl 39, 820. It is the case for Erasmus in the adage The Sileni of Alcibiades. For example, here is the testimony of Montaigne: “the physicians […] eat melons and drink iced wines, whilst they confine their patients to syrups and sops” (“nos medecins mangent le melon et boivent le vin frais, cependant qu’ ils tiennent leur patient obligé au sirop et à la panade”). The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, vol. iii, ch. 9, trans. C. Cotton (Digireads.com Publishing: 2009), 704. cw, 79; G 33, 94. See for example “Lemnius,” a procedure to serve wine “as cold as ice” (Les occultes merveilles et secrets de nature (Paris: 1574), 208 r). See also Pasquier, “Un cratère-rafraîchissoir au musée du Louvre.” Charles Estienne, L’ agriculture et maison rustique de MM. Charles Estienne et Jean Liebault, docteurs en Medecine (Lyon: 1583), 339 r. See Guy Demerson, “Trinch ou les hiéroglyphes de la boisson,” 142. In the edition enlarged by Jean Liébault of Charles Estienne’s Agriculture et maison rus-

370

milhe poutingon

ing cool wine and to share it in toasting, at the end of The Fifth and Last Book, certainly seems part of a discourse celebrating man when he lives according to ethics and charity, but additionally when he is inventive, molding nature according to his will. This is why the ultimate dicta of Bacbuc refrain from celebrating wine, but instead celebrate “l’invention” (“discovery”) and “l’ art” (that is to say practical knowledge, and technology): “the art of agriculture,” which was “taught” to humanity by Ceres, “the discovery of wheat,” which has replaced “among humans the brutish eating of acorns” (just as wine has taken over from water), “the art, invented long ago by Prometheus, of calling down from the heavens celestial fire and lightning”66 are benefits similarly “wonderful.” Ceres and Prometheus appear here as allegorical figures representing the capacity of man to progress by means of discovery and mastery of the world. The passage of the manuscript corresponding to this discourse is even more explicit. Apart from an allusion to Erasmus’s adage Tempus omnia revelat, we find an ambitious discourse on man’s ability to discover, one day or another, all of the hidden mysteries of nature: “by Time shall be all hidden things invented,” pronounces Bacbuc.67 The end of The Fifth and Last Book echoes a positive conception of man, a creature imbued with dignity.68 This theme is not only to be found in The Fifth and Last Book. The Pantagruelion, the enigmatic plant which is praised at the end of The Third Book, shows the triumph of technology over pure nature. In chapter 24 of Gargantua, Ponocrates and Gargantua observe various craftsmen at work (clockmakers, goldsmiths, mirror-makers, printers), with the object of learning from all their methods. The chapter ends with the manufacture of small machines and in particular, “several little automatic machines”: human ingenuity manages to create objects capable of automatic movement. Beforehand, Ponocrates and Gargantua, whilst botanizing “in the lovely meadow,” “recited [“recoloient”] some beautiful verses of Virgil’s Agriculture, of Hesiod, of Politian’s Rusticus,

66 67 68

tique, the chapter dealing with wine recalls that water “was the first ever drink” (“le premier breuvage”), the “drink common to all animals” (“le boire commun de tous animaux”), whereas wine comes from “agriculture” (“culture”) as a result of man’s activity (L’ agriculture et maison rustique, 337 r). cw, 715; cl 47, 839. cw, 930. See Pantagruel, chapter 8 (cw, 158; P 8, 241). However, Rabelais is aware that human nature is also corrupt and prone to making errors. For example, Pantagruel begins by recalling the murder of Abel by Cain (see cw, 137; P 1, 217). This ambivalence is very widespread throughout the literature of the epoch.

the fifth and last book (1564)

371

quoted a few pleasing epigrams in Latin […].”69 Rabelais plays on the meaning of the ancient verb recoler: metaphorically, this verb means “to remind,” “to recite.” However, its derivation is from a Latin verb (recolo) of which the literal sense, when applied to working of the earth, is “to cultivate anew.” By this play on words, Rabelais renders human intelligence and the relationship with the earth indistinguishable. It is surely in The Fifth and Last Book that the theme of the capacity of man to imitate and manage nature by employing technology appears most often, notably during the final initiation. Before the “Trinch,” Bacbuc shows the Pantagruelists a fountain constructed in such a way that the water flies up instead of descending.70 Panurge and his companions have also witnessed, in a state of wonder, the movement of inanimate objects: the opening of the temple doors by means of some clever technology employing a magnet: “I was marveling how the two doors, each by itself, with no pressure from anyone, were thus opened.”71 Thus, we meet again the automatic movement of objects described in chapter 24 of Gargantua. When nature is up to the challenge, the ingenuity of man permits the reproduction of a natural phenomenon: in the manuscript Bacbuc provides three wineskins whose function is to create the wind necessary to “follow a straight route […] safely and pleasantly, with no danger of any tempest” on the return journey.72 Man proves himself equally capable of imitating the world: the mosaic representing the army of Bacchus is even more “admirable” (“this so that you may no longer so admire the art of Apelles”) for their realism than the paintings of Apelles.73 Equally “wonderful” (“admirable,” says Rabelais) is a sculpture representing some children with bunches of grapes, “so ingeniously represented by art that nature could do no better.”74 The temple and fountain at the center of which is found the “Divine Bottle” are described in detail as architectural and technical wonders. The notion of “art” is particularly recurrent in the chapters concerning initiation. Taking Rabelais’s works as a whole, it is in The Fifth and Last Book that the word art appears most often.75 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

cw, 61; G 24, 72. cw, 703; cl 42, 824. cw, 691; cl 36, 814. cw, 930. cw, 696; cl 39, 820. cw, 699; cl 40, 823. Six occurrences in Pantagruel, twelve in Gargantua, thirteen in the Third Book, seventeen in the Fourth Book (but nine figure in chapter 57, on Gaster, of which one of the characteristics is to be the “master of all the arts”), compared to twenty two in The Fifth and Last Book. Even taking into account these variations of the sense of the word art, the differ-

372

milhe poutingon

This work is therefore a reflection of its epoch: the infatuation (which was certainly variable from place to place) of 16th-century men with technology;76 such infatuation helped define this period as the “first industrial civilization,”77 the “first great century of technical thought.”78 Among these techniques, agriculture was to play an important role. It was in the 16th century that the metaphor of “culture,” of “cultured” man, developed,79 notably reflecting the idea, inspired by Cicero, that the variety of the world is shown in perfect eloquence.80 This metaphor equally bears witness to the enthusiasm with which we welcome the idea that man can imitate and dominate nature by means of technology. In the final discourse of Bacbuc, the eulogy of “the art of agriculture” echoes repeatedly the agricultural imagery of the prologue of The Fifth and Last Book. There, Rabelais compares his “joyous fruitful books of Pantagruelism” to beans.81 In this way he mocks the followers of Pythagorism, in which the consumption of these vegetables is forbidden. On the contrary, Rabelais invites us “to shell them” and “to devour them.” As beans are used in an allegorical way to describe Rabelais’s works, The Fifth and Last Book appears as “a nice handsome basketfull plucked in the same garden as the ones before.”82 Thus, Rabelais places his literary creation under the heading of “garden,” of a form of nature dominated, organized and surpassed by human skillfulness. It is significant that The Fifth and Last Book was made accessible to the public in 1564 by Jean de Mayerne who was a Doctor of Medicine. That same year he also published the posthumous edition of Agriculture et maison rustique by Charles Estienne, who was also a Doctor of Medicine before becoming a printer. This work on practical agronomy also bears witness to this concept, according to which the earth is never so “fertile and full of fecundity” (“fertile et feconde”) as when it is “honored by a triumphant and victorious laborer”

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

ence is remarkable. The adverb artificiellement also deserves a mention: one occurrence in Pantagruel, four in The Fifth and Last Book. See Jack E.G. Dixon and John L. Dawson (eds.), Concordance des œuvres de François Rabelais (er) 26 (Geneva: 1992), 51. See Bertrand Gille, Les ingénieurs de la Renaissance (Paris: 1964). John Nef, La naissance de la civilisation industrielle et le monde contemporain (Paris: 1954). Anne-Françoise Garçon, “Histoire de la notion de progrès. Leçon 3: Les nouveaux régimes du savoir, 1520–1580.” https://sites.google.com/site/afgarcon/home. See Michel Jeanneret, Perpetuum mobile: Métamorphoses des corps et des œuvres de Vinci à Montaigne (Paris: 1997), 204. See Danièle Duport, Ronsard et la poétique du paysage (Geneva: 2000), 19. cw, 611; cl Prologue, 725. cw, 613; cl Prologue, 728. It should be remembered that the prologue of this book is in reality a primitive version of the prologue of The Third Book.

the fifth and last book (1564)

373

(“honnoree d’un laboureur triomphant et victorieux”) having conquered the resistance of nature.83

4

Distillation

This desire to tame nature by technical skillfulness is at the heart of the doctrine of alchemy, which aims to reproduce and master the laws of nature. In the 16th century, the art of gardening and alchemical distillation are constantly associated, in allegorical,84 but also in practical,85 ways. The edition of L’Agriculture et maison rustique is attributed to Jean Liébaut, the son-in-law of Charles Estienne. Now, Liébault is a Doctor of Medicine and also a distiller.86 He adds to Estienne’s treatise long sections on the methods of distillation. Magic, kabbalah, and alchemy play a major role in Renaissance thought.87 The esotericism in The Fifth and Last Book has its origins in alchemy. There we find many explicit allusions to the practical process of distillation. For example, the “Divine Bottle” bathes in a fountain of very pure water evoking the quintessence which issues forth from distillation;88 before journeying to the Queen Quint Essence, whilst at sea the Pantagruelists encounter a ship, onboard which there are some alchemists,89 notably the enigmatic Henri Cotiral, who was joyful to see the narrator, whom he believes to be called “Master Alcofribas, abstractor of quintessence.” An “abstractor” is a distiller.90 It was 83 84 85

86

87 88

89 90

“Epître à Jacques de Crussol,” in L’ Agriculture et maison rustique, s. p. See Danièle Duport, Le jardin et la nature: Ordre et variété dans la littérature de la Renaissance (Geneva: 2002), 182. We read in L’ agriculture et maison rustique, 247 r, that distillation must be performed by “the farmer’s wife, in the country house” (“la maistresse et fermiere de nostre Maison Rustique”). He is the author of the Quatre livres des secrets de medecine et de la philosophie chimique, esquels sont […] traitées bien amplement les manières de distiller eaux, huyles, et quinte essences (Lyon: 1593). It is a much-extended translation of a part of Gessner’s Thesaurus … de remediis secretis. For the extensive bibliography regarding this question, see Didier Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme. The fountain is “full of water as clear as an element in all its simplicity could be” (cw, 706) (cl 42, 830: “pleine d’ eau tant clere, que pourroit estre un element en sa simplicité.”) As stipulated by all the authors of treatises on Distillation, such as Jean Brouault (d. 1604), the quintessence is a sort of “water […] reduced to its simplest state” (“eau […] menée à sa plus haute simplicité”). See Jean Brouault, Traité de l’eau de vie ou anatomie theorique et pratique du vin (Paris: 1646), 29. cw, 648; cl 17, 765. “Distillation is the job of an alchemist, another name for which is Abstractor of quin-

374

milhe poutingon

typical at that time that a doctor would be the one to strive to develop remedies in the hope of benefiting all humanity.91 In L’Agriculture et maison rustique, it is written that the distillation and development of quintessence serves “to assist, rescue” (“secourir”), it is a matter of “charitable custom” (“coustume charitable”) with the aim of developing “remedies” (“remedes”) to heal “illnesses” (“des maladies”) which attack “afflicted people” (“les pauvres gens”).92 The practice of distillation was therefore a charitable work. It can be reasonably accepted that Rabelais, a doctor who was concerned about charity and who concealed himself behind a facetious persona we call “abstractor of quintessence,” had the mindset of a distiller.93 It is certainly difficult to determine if he is always serious when he mentions alchemy.94 In particular, some ironic remarks which appear throughout the episode of the Quint Essence spring to mind. The queen’s palace is “not far” from the port of “Mateotechny,” a name whose meaning is “vain, foolish science.” Chapter 21 describes in detail the alchemists of this lady performing all sorts of absurd activities. The Quint Essence employs among other things, a language so complex that the Pantagruelists misunderstand it.95 Using a traditional metaphor assimilating language to an item of clothing, Rabelais announces that it is a matter of “silken-smooth words such as Parisatis used in addressing her son Cyrus or words at least of crimson taffeta”: the correction (“or words at least of crimson taffeta”) is an ironic way of mocking this grandiloquent style, which in fact harks back to the “silken, crimson rhetoric” which appertains to “great things, matters arduous, serious, and difficult” rejected by Rabelais in the prologue.96 Moreover, at the heart of the chapter describing the activities of the “officers” of the Quint, Rabelais labels Aristophanes, who is for him a major source of inspiration, as “quintessential”: “as Aristophanes the Quintessential affirms.”97 The word quintessential, in this case, has an abstract meaning: it is a metaphor signifying the concept of excellence. Thus, Rabelais diverts the notion of “quintessence” away from its concrete alchemical context.

91 92 93 94 95 96 97

tessence” (“Distillation est œuvre d’ un alkemiste, autrement dit Abstracteur de quintessence”). L’ Agriculture et maison rustique, 247 r. See Suzanne Colnort-Bodet, Le code alchimique dévoilé (Paris: 1989). L’ Agriculture et maison rustique, 247 r. Mireille Huchon gives very convincing information enabling us to conclude that Rabelais had a very real interest in distillation and alchemy (Rabelais, 125–134). See in particular the debates, the content of which is reflected in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome. cw, 651; cl 19, 768–769. cw, 612; cl Prologue, 726. cw, 656; cl 21, 774.

the fifth and last book (1564)

375

This diversion, which is categorized within the long description of pseudoalchemical activities, ironically emphasizes the futility of those who attempt to “quintessencier” literally. At the present time the Rabelaisian ideas on alchemy remain a subject of debate. It is possible that a dialectic of opposites, typical of Rabelais, is put into effect in The Fifth and Last Book. In his work, an important theme is generally confronted by an antagonist. The tyrannical figure of Picrochole opposes the idealized concept of an enlightened monarch in the form of Grandgousier; the retrograde education of the “sophists” is the opposite of the enlightened education of Ponocrates, etc. The question arises, therefore, whether The Fifth and Last Book does not dismiss a too abstract and exclusively philosophical alchemy (as opposed to an alchemy concerned with distillation, more closely associated with reality and the natural world) without coming down in favor of either. Jean Liébault, for example, exposes the “speculations of persons living a life of luxury” (“les speculations de personnes oysives”), the “lies of Philosophers” (“les mensonges et vanités” des “Philosophes”), the “daydreams of Alchemists [who] have never experimented anything” (“les resveries des Alchymistes [qui] n’ont jamais rien experimenté”).98 In fact, The Fifth and Last Book puts into play two grand female figures undergoing initiation and also linked to alchemy: the Queen Quint Essence and the “Pontiff” Bacbuc. However, on further consideration, it is a matter of a pair of antagonists, Bacbuc proves herself to be superior to the Quint: a queen holds temporal power but a “pontiff” has spiritual power (which is more useful when it is a case of accessing wisdom); the queen arouses terror within the Pantagruelists, but Bacbuc arouses their joy;99 the “pontiff,” who celebrates divine wisdom, is more humane and benevolent than the queen, which is a simple allegory of Aristotelian philosophical concepts.100

5

Experience

In The Fifth and Last Book, the interest in scientific methods and distillation is a sign of its time, as exemplified by the value placed upon experimentation, the possibility to acquire knowledge by observation, and practical matters and mastery of the material world. The literate of the 16th century, who

98 99 100

Quatre livres des secrets de medecine (Lyon: 1593), 273. cw, 651, 699; cl 19, 768; cl 41, 823. cw, 649; cl 18, 766.

376

milhe poutingon

were “increasingly attracted by concrete reality rather than by speculative approaches” (“davantage attirés par l’aspect concret des réalités que par la speculation”),101 understand that other, more direct ways exist. They adopt a down-to-earth view of things and are interested by the observable laws of the universe and its quantifiable properties. They attach importance to the fact that men are certainly equipped with the capacity of thought, but also with a physical body. Montaigne pronounces that “the senses are the beginning and the end of human knowledge” (“toute cognoissance s’achemine en nous par les sens, ce sont nos maistres”).102 The senses are an instrument of knowledge. This is one of the reasons why Rabelais condemns drunkenness: an excess of wine, he says, brings about “perturbation of sense,” stifling the access to truth.103 In Rabelais’s works as a whole, we find a good twenty occurrences of the word expérience and its variants.104 Rabelais insists on the fact that we can make an affirmation as soon as we have experienced something, because it is a case of “unfailing” (cw, 134) access to our consciousness and memory. The experience passes, above all, via the senses: sight, which ensures the truthfulness of a fact.105 The prologue of The Fifth and Last Book associates consciousness and visual experience, deriving from one the condition of the other: “Experience demonstrates this to us, you know it, you see it” (“L’experience nous le demonstre, vous le scavez, vous le voyez”).106 This confidence in concrete experience is expressed also in certain satirical passages, in particular the episode of the “land of Satin,” where beasts and things are represented in tapestries107 as simple images: the trees never lose their leaves, their fruit cannot be consumed, the animals never eat. Among these animals figure all sorts of imaginary creatures, either mythical or known only by the fantastic descriptions of ancient bestiaries. Thus, Rabelais mocks lying mythologies and false naturalist scholars who project themselves as speaking truth about the real world without having ever truly observed it. This episode comes to an end with the portrait of a “misshapen and monstrous” old man named “Hearsay,” an allegorical incarnation of

101 102 103 104 105

106 107

Georges Matoré, Le vocabulaire et la société du xvie siècle (Paris: 1988), 30. The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, vol. iii, ch. 9, 423. cw, 687; cl 33, 809. See Dixon and Dawson, Concordance des œuvres de François Rabelais, 326. In bearing witness to frequent declarations, such as: “and you see this by experience” (cw, 29); G 10, 32: “et le voyez par experience;” “we have seen this by experience” (cw, 411); tl 52, 511: “Nous en avons veu l’ experience.” cw, 610; cl Prologue, 725. cw, 678; cl 29, 799. See Jean Céard, “L’érudition dans le Cinquiesme Livre,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, 41–53 (49).

the fifth and last book (1564)

377

voyagers and indoor cosmographers,108 authors of rubbishy pseudo-geographic literature, based only on rumor, on hearsay, and not upon visual observation. In this way, Rabelais reflects his contemporaries, for whom truth is guaranteed by the status of the eyewitness who is testifying. One must be in close contact with the thing which one describes, or to have been present at the event upon which one is reporting.109 However, if a high value was placed upon experimentation and actual experience at that time, it is on condition that it must be allied to the intelligence and rationality derived from scholarly knowledge. To quote Etienne du Tronchet, who declares to have sought the “sovereign virtue […] as much by reading books as by experiencing things directly” (“la souveraine vertu […] tant par la lecture des livres que par l’experience des choses”), the “pen” (“la plume”) of the author flies, from that moment on, “upon the wings of experience and reason” (“avec les ailes de l’experience et de la raison”).110 In the episode of the Pantagruelion, Rabelais writes about an experimentation which bears witness to the capacity for technical cleverness within men: That’s down in writing. It’s true, and attested by a thousand experiments. […] But those who didn’t know it and never saw it wouldn’t think it possible.111 The truth is in the alliance of the “writing” (“escript”) and the “experiment” (“experience”). In order to “think possible” (“croyre”), one must “know” (“sçavoir”) et “see” (“veoir”). This prerequisite association of concrete experience and reason is proposed many times in The Fifth and Last Book, where the characters are confronted with unnatural events. The automatic movement of the temple gates is explained when the narrator shows himself to be “convoiteux de sçavoir”112 the nature of such a movement, and duly discovers the magnetic plates. Similarly, the Pantagruelists observe Quint Essence’s dancers. Their whirling around resembles the paradoxical movement of a “Rhombe girante” (a top):

108 109 110 111 112

cw, 682; cl 30, 804. See Frank Lestringant, “D’ un insulaire l’autre,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, 81–102. See Frank Lestringant, L’ atelier du cosmographe (Paris: 1991). Lettres missives et familieres (Paris: 1569), 214 r, 52 r. cw, 410; tl 52, 510: “Cela est escript. Il est vray et averé par mille experiences. […] Mais ceulx qui ne l’ ont sceu et ne le veirent oncques, ne le croyroient possible.” cl 36, 815. The narrator “needs to know.” Frame’s translation: “To understand this wonder […] I cast my eyes …” (cw, 691).

378

milhe poutingon

We were comparing these to the motion of a top in a little children’s game, spinning under the strokes of the whip, when its turn is so swift that its motion is rest, and it seems still, not moving but sleeping, as they call it. And when it has a colored dot showing on it, it seems to our eye to be not a dot but a continuous line.113 A top makes a gyration appear like immobility, and a point as if it were a continuous line. But these paradoxes have a rational explanation once we understand that it is a matter of illusion created by the extreme rapidity (“so swift,” “lorsque tant subit est son tour”) of the top. In the episode on the island of Odes, Rabelais mentions two other deceptive movements due to optical illusions: it is the earth which turns about its poles, not the sky, “even though the contrary seems to be true” and, when we are in a boat on the river, it is not the trees which move, but the craft on which we are sitting.114 It is again necessary to praise the desire for knowledge and human intelligence, for it is by these that we correct the errors due to sensory experience.

∵ The satire directed against the Roman Church and the judiciary, the praise of wine, the ambiguous treatment of esoteric mysteries, or the reflections about evil and about charity, are all part of Rabelais’s world. It also contains notions less frequently brought to the fore by specialists, such notions as technology and experience, which play important roles in The Fifth and Last Book. Consequently, if the construction of this work sometimes suffers from incoherence, its overall objective remains Rabelaisian. As Richard Cooper says, The Fifth and Last Book of 1564 is a text “écrit dans le sillage de Rabelais, qui prolonge une réflexion sur certains de ses grands thèmes.”115 Translated by Ken Garner 113

114 115

cw, 664; cl 24, 784: “Et les voyans sus un pied tournoyer, […] les comparions au mouvement d’ une Rhombe girante, au jeu des petis enfans, moyennant les coups de fouet: lors que tant subit est son tour, son mouvement est repos, elle semble quiete, non soy mouvoir, et y figurant un point de quelque couleur semble à nostre veuë non point estre mais ligne continue.” cw, 666; cl 25, 787. “L’ authenticité du Cinquiesme Livre: État présent de la question,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, 9–22 (21).

part 3 Influence, Impact, and Style

∵

chapter 15

At the Foot of the Letter, La Pantagrueline Prognostication Tom Conley

Today “experience” has become a commodity of everyday life. Airlines tell us to buy premium and business class seats to obtain the unique “experience” they offer. Hotel chains send us surveys cheerfully asking us to evaluate our “experience” of their accommodations. Car dealers beg us to appreciate the sublimities of the “driving experience” their products provide. Film historians tell us the cellphone offers a new “experience” of cinema. Historians and critics appeal to cognitive science to specify what had been the “experience” of life in other times and spaces. From the perspective of hindsight, when perception— or experience tout court—appears to be a function of electronic technology, amateurs of Rabelais can ask what has become of their “experience” of the writings: When and how did we happen upon the work, and for what reason does it bear on how we live here-and-now? Could it be that the nature of a first “experience” of Gargantua and Pantagruel was an encounter of something uncommonly strange and unsettling? Did possibly unnamed or unnamable circumstances motivate our attraction to—our désir de connaître—a difficult, hilarious, obscure, seemingly irreverent, ever uncanny body of writing? Sorting through the effects of five books of such different facture and character, we wonder how it is that despite the erudition that covers the work, as if we were meeting the cabbage planter in Pantagruel, we carry with us the pleasure of a first encounter with it? In what follows a major contention is that Rabelais exerts an exceptional force of attraction when read in the print and paper of his own lifetime. Modern editions, however faithful they are, however much they account for the work’s myriad variations, no matter how informative and copious the commentary and erudition, fail to convey the “experience” of the work in its initial form.1

1 Guy Demerson’s invaluable bilingual edition of the Œuvres complètes (Paris: 1973), in which a translation in modern French is juxtaposed to the orthography of the original, is no exception. Gargantua and Pantagruel follow François Juste’s edition of 1542, and his transcriptions both of the Tiers Livre and Quart Livre are based on Michel Fezandat’s editions, reviewed

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_017

382

conley

Riddled with notes and elucidations, modern transcriptions steer us away from the enigma of the unknown, the very object of the writing itself.2 Imagining ourselves discovering Rabelais in his own moment, rehearsing for ourselves a first encounter with the work, reading the material in its nascent condition, we discover a generative force that can be attributed to a strong degree to its graphic character. The appeal of the aspect of the books printed in Rabelais’s lifetime—their modest size in-octavo, the texture of their paper, the color and smell of the vellum binding, the mix of type forms, insertion of woodcuts having everything and nothing to do with the text, the layout of title-pages—can be so appealing that we lose ourselves in the books themselves: hence every adept of Rabelais feels an imperious need to work through early editions in digital facsimile or, better, to read and turn their pages in the sanctuaries of rare book rooms. Thanks to the internet and to the availability of digital reproductions, the material aspect of Rabelais is felt with immediacy. Today we are enabled to read digitized copies of the early editions, adjacent to their annotated transcriptions that tell how the author is a function of his books.3 Akin to others of his time, especially in this work that remains unattributed, to a strong degree Rabelais’s nascent signature emerges from collaboration with other authors, with editors, typesetters, distributors, woodcutters and hosts of friends and enemies. Prior to 1546, the date of Chrestien Wechel’s edition of the Tiers Livre, the first to carry Rabelais’s proper name, the earlier writing underscores both the mutability of the author’s identity and, by implication, of the book, the regretted Michel Jeanneret has deftly noted, as a mobile and perpetually changing commodity.4 In editions of Pantagruel and Gargantua from circa 1534 to 1542 the rearrangement of the letters that veil François Rabelais under the cloth of Alcofribas Nasier indicates that the author’s identities are a function of moveable type,

and corrected by the author, published in 1552. In these texts and in the 1564 edition of the Cinquième et Dernier Livre and the letters and other or minor works, offering a unique vue d’ ensemble or overview of the oeuvre, he notes nonetheless that no modern edition can reproduce the visual and sensual effect of the work in its early formatting and use of different typeface. 2 The relation could be one that touches on the unknown or alterity in general, what Guy Rosolato takes up in “L’inconnu dans l’ idéalisation du désir,” in La portée du désir ou la psychanalyse même (Paris: 1996), 153–169, a summary of his Relation d’inconnu (Paris: 1978). 3 Rabelais is an author whom Romain Menini calls “ce grand Altérateur”, an “alterator,” or an “estranger” of the hundreds of books and things that pass through his writing, in Rabelais altérateur: “Graeciser en François” (Paris: 2014), 1001 and passim. 4 Michel Jeanneret, Perpetuum mobile: Métamorphoses des corps et des œuvres de Vinci à Montaigne (Geneva: 2016); a revised edition of a work first published in 1997 (Paris).

at the foot of the letter, la pantagrueline prognostication

383

of letters that can be moved about at will, characters whose force of meaning or signification, whose very impression depends on spacing, placement, and contiguity to other letters, words, and printed signs. In the scramble of Alcofribas, he is an alchemist or extracteur de quinte essence; a bonimenteur, or brash seller of patent medicine; a facetious impresario or présentateur of enigmatic material; a Lucianesque historiographer; and, in the early writings, an architriclin, a factotum who furnishes his master with food, conviviality and cheer. A first indication of this aspect of the graphic virtue of Rabelais’s vernacular writing is found on the title-page of the Pantagrueline prognostication certaine veritable & infallible pour lan mil.d.xxxiii. nouvellement compose au profit & advisement de gens estourdis et musars de nature par maistre Alcobribas architriclin dudict Pantagruel [Fig. 15.1].5 Set below the title that displays three typographic forms (the incipit P in a historiated initial in floral field), the nine characters composing the rest of the title are in lettre bâtarde of point size three times greater than the remainder that follows in four lines. Immediately below, a truncated woodcut illustrates a fou, identified by his cap and rabbit ears, in dialogue with a learned man dressed in a tunic. Pointing to the sun and stars in the firmament, he strives to impart truth to a reticent interlocutor to his left. The name Alcofribas is set above the face of the sun that occupies the upper left corner of the frame, while Pantagruel is placed above and to the immediate right of the face of the moon, in profile, in the upper right corner. Standing in the midst of a landscape of two rolling hills roughly defined by parallel hatching, the fool attends to the stars while his partner, the index finger of his left hand aimed not upward but at the world within the purview of his sight, seems merely to listen to the fool’s words. A pelican and two birds fly in the sky. A ball or globe sits on the earth, adjacent to the lower edge of the woodcut, where two feet and the lower portion of the scholar’s tunic are cut away (and a piece of a second ball near the lower left corner of the image). Seasoned readers note that the cut is taken from the section of a French edition of Sebastian Brant’s immensely popular Nef des fous [Stultifera navis], published in Lyons in 1530, whose satire is aimed at the folly of astrolo-

5 In Les éditions de Rabelais de 1532 à 1711 (Paris: 1904), entry #25, 53–54, Pierre-Paul Plan notes that the only extant copy of this edition [n.p. (Lyon?), n.d. (1532?)] is held in the Bibliothèque Nationale [de France] (Réserve Y2 2125). Reference is made to the Harvard Houghton copy (*FC5 R1125 532pa), of very slight variation with the bnf copy, for which a digital reproduction is available: https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:17949614$1i.

384

figure 15.1

conley

Title-page, Pantagrueline Prognostication certaine veritable et infallible pour lan mil. d.xxxiii (Lyon: François Juste, 1532)

at the foot of the letter, la pantagrueline prognostication

385

gers.6 Below the image, as if it were a legend to an emblem (whose image and title or motto stand above), the text beneath, in the same point size as much of the title above, are printed a mish-mash of words referring to astrology. Because of the loose or unstated connection between the woodcut and the printed writing, any of the characters above could be uttering “¶ De ce nombre dor non dicitur/ie nen trouue point ceste annee quelque calculation que ien aye faict/passons oultre/qu’en a si sen deface en moy/qui n’ en a sy en cherche. Verte folium” (Nothing being said about this golden number, no matter what I calculation I’ve made this year, I haven’t found a thing; let’s move on; he who has can be done with me, and he who has not can look here. Turn the page). Displaced into a context slightly other than that of the Nef des folz, from which it is drawn, the image would stage what Bernd Renner calls a “ ‘dialogical’ dialogue,” a verbal and visual teeter-totter between a sermon and a farce, presenting in the same arena at least two points of view.7 In a loose or implicit relation with the surrounding text, the woodcut suggests that any resolution of the words to follow will be impossible. Furthermore, for the same seasoned readers noting the provenance of the cut, reference could be made to another, less explicit dialogue, one shared between two implied interlocutors, Rabelais himself and his learned friend from Poitiers, Jean Bouchet, the humanist who had prepared the Lyons edition of La Grand nef des folz.8 Adepts of satire and

6 The first French edition by de Phillipi, de Marnef and others (Paris: 1497) uses copies of the woodcuts in the original edition printed in Basel (1494). In the satire of the astrologer, the fool and savant stand in a lush landscape in which trees grow on the hillsides and where a church stands in the background. Four birds and six stars are in the sky, while the men, the pleats and fold of their garments carefully drawn, are shown in full view (f. lvii r). In François Juste’s edition, by Jean Drouyn based on Jakob Locher’s Latin version, the woodcuts “are the work of two or more Lyonnese engravers (…) marked by strong lines, vigorous parallel hatching, and figures animated by lively facial expressions rendered in simple clear strokes. Several of the cuts are exact copies of the Basel originals, but most use more angular lines and tend to simplify or eliminate background details” among others the image on the title-page of the Pantagrueline prognostication: https://www.vialibri.net/years/items/873844/1530‑brant‑sebastian‑1458‑1521​ ‑la‑grand‑nef‑des‑folz‑du. The title-page carries Juste’s cornucopian emblem that figures as a tailpiece to the Prognostication. See also Stephen Rawles and Michael Screech, A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais Before 1626, (er) 20 (Geneva: 1987), entry 113. 7 Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007), 41. 8 In her Rabelais Mireille Huchon suggests that, good friends in 1530, Rabelais and Bouchet had much to share with each other, and that the allusion to Bouchet’s version of La Grand nef des fols du monde … is crucial for understanding in an Erasmian vein, contrary to Bouchet’s penchant for prudence, exactly how Rabelais uses satire to motivate and mobilize wisdom. Nonetheless, the coupling could be “[c]lins d’ œil évidents entre les deux œuvres et les deux

386

conley

reform, both appealed to visual and graphic material to promote the cause of satire: Bouchet first in Les Regnars traversant and then in La Nef des folz, and Rabelais in La Pantagrueline Prognostication, in a configuration that shares much with the design of the latter’s entire œuvre to follow over the next thirty years.9 Because the image portrays a fool wearing the cap and bells, the cut might also be affiliated with the Encomium moriae, a similarly dialogical work, and less directly but allusively with Thomas More’s Utopia, which would be a setting, for reason of its construction of an unfathomable area in which space and place or things heavenly and real are reconciled, with and against which the prognostication is written. The woodcut enhances the political and aesthetic potential of the prognostication as a genre, and at the same time it establishes what becomes the ever-divided or prismatic aspect or flicker of practically all of Rabelais’s writings that follow over the two decades.10 Crucial to the design is the macaronic idiom, mixing Latin and French, in which learned and popular discourse are in consort and conflict. At the lower right-hand corner of the title-page, following the imperative cherche, “Verte folium” is printed exactly where readers would place their fingers to “turn the page” or folio [Fig. 15.2]:11

9

10

11

amis, très tôt embarqués de conserve sur la nef des fols! Plaidoyer pur une écriture en vernaculaire, goût pour l’ historiographie, célébration de la monarchie française et condamnation des politiques de Charles Quint et d’ Henri viii, amour de l’Antiquité, dénonciation morale des vices du monde,” in Rabelais (Paris: 2011), 107. Elsewhere, notes Huchon, “Prendre conseil de soi-même, se connaître, refuser de songer un avenir qui n’appartient qu’ à Dieu, ces enseignements de la Nef des fols sont au cœur de l’œuvre rabelaisienne” in “Rabelais et les satires de la Nef des folz de 1530,” in La Satire dans tous ses états, ed. B. Renner (Genève: 2009), 77–92 (92). Huchon notes that Brant’s Regnars traversant “is a virulent attack against nobility, the Church, justice, courtisans, hypocrites, monks” (Rabelais, 105). Its use of woodcut images to drive and enhance remains a strong part of its legacy, a virtue not lost upon the author and editor of the first edition of the Pantagrueline Prognostication. A major point of reference is Michael A. Screech et al. (eds.), Pantagrueline prognostication pour l’ an 1533 avec les almanachs pour les ans 1533, 1535 et 1541. La grande et vraye prognostication nouvelle de 1544 (Geneva: 1974). The edition does not take account of the woodcut on the title-page of the edition of 1533. Other editions of the work do not put the imperative in the same place. In a concurrent copy (Plan, entry #26, 55) that prints five woodcuts portraying fools and savants between the title and the legend, “Verte folium” is not placed at the corner; so also another edition (Plan, entry #27, 56), whereas, in the hourglass-design of the Prognostication for the year 1535 that François Juste published in 1534 (Plan, entry #28, 57–58), the formula stands at an edge, albeit within the frame of the ornate border that frames his editions of Gargantua, Pantagruel, and works of other writers.

at the foot of the letter, la pantagrueline prognostication

figure 15.2

387

Lower corner, title-page of the Pantagrueline Prognostication

The format suggests that, like a trickster, the fool speaks with a forked tongue: what we see and hear in and of the words and their spaces can be other than what they appear to mean. In the context that the woodcut establishes, it is implied that everything and nothing can be gleaned from stars above. With or without astrologers, taking heed of the fool’s words, readers will do well to proceed from where they are and go beyond, at their own risk, into realms unknown.12 Read between French and Latin, the comic locution implies that folly belongs to the material aspect and formatting of the printed sheet. When the page is turned, the commanding presence of the woodcut image gives way to a full and elegantly formatted page of writing under the title, ¶ Au liseur benivole Salut et paix en Jesuchrist, that promises a sermon [Fig. 15.3]. The ludic character of an image and a macaronic discourse recto has at first glance a “serious” counterpart verso. To turn the page means to move between one mode of apprehension or cognition and another, as it were, from seeing

12

In his Dictionarie of the French & English Tongues (London: 1611), Randle Cotgrave notes: “Passer oultre: to tipe up the heeles, to die.”

388

figure 15.3

conley

Prologue to the Pantagrueline Prognostication, printed on the opposite side of the title-page of the Prognostication

at the foot of the letter, la pantagrueline prognostication

389

to reading and back and forth again. Implied is that the design of the printed book allows the reading to go forwards and backwards, both to progress and to regress, perhaps to be at once in two different states of being.13 The sermonic tone of the captatio at the top of the page stands above a polemical incipit of a single paragraph in tightly spaced bâtarde. Calling in question a “pile of Prognostications from Louvain [Loain] written in the shadow of a glass of wine,” the speaker identifies himself first as a bookseller hawking his wares, and no sooner—in the same sentence—as a priest, citing the Psalms [5:6], who fulminates against prevaricators and, by implication, soothsayers of his own ilk. As stated later, he embraces the lower echelons of society, “le poure monde qui est curieulx de scavoir choses nouvelles” (the poor who are eager to learn of new things). As the introduction unfolds the retinal presence of the image on the other side of the sheet suggests that each sentence could be of a voice in dialogue with what precedes or follows. In the third sentence the denizens of France, subject of praise elsewhere in the pamphlet, are shown to be impatient as they are inquisitive and curious. When their desire to obtain new knowledge is not sated, their good will and credulousness turn into frustration and anger. To remedy the situation one of the interlocutors suggests that gatekeepers, customs officials as it were, be placed at entryways to the kingdom to examine and to sift fact from the fiction in reports coming from afar. The response of the other, Ouy certes (Yes, surely), betrays doubt and incertitude. His partner, now pegged as Alcofribas, utters that under his “good master Pantagruel,” acting thus “everywhere in the country of Utopia and Dipsodia,” has brought such prosperity to the kingdom that good drinkers and tipplers will need to consume the surplus of wine. We cannot know if the fool or the savant has undertaken the task “to satisfy the curiosity” of all good companions—possibly French subjects inasmuch as the prognostication is in praise of France—but in all events, as they are at the end of the prologue to Gargantua, the speaker’s final words are as ambivalent and divided as the positions taken by the fool and the scholar in Brant’s woodcut.

13

In À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (Paris: 2015), 57–68, I have essayed the point in reference to the composition of Pantagruel and to the title-page of an edition of the complete works, published in 1553, that could be of Parisian origin.

390 1

conley

As the Pilcrow Flies

Oscillating between sermon and coq-à-l’âne, as if spoken in a single voice, the six chapters that follow tend to lose the dialogic character of the prologue. The fifth chapter (“De l’estat d’aulcuns gens”) uses the seven planets as headings to serve as categories that distinguish all kinds of malfeasants and ne’er-do-wells, while the sixth (“De l’estat d’aulcuns pays”), a comedy of cultural geography, sets the kingdom of France apart from other European and Asian nations. In these chapters, in what appears to be conventional typographic usage, a pilcrow (in French, pied-de-mouche) isolates each of the categories from one another. For Rabelais in the early 1530s, and clearly in this copy of the Prognostication, the sign indicative of a paragraph-to-follow is a virtual ideogram, like a manicule, that points to a content but also “signifies” or contains in its form more than what it represents. Set before the headings of the prologue and the titles of each of the first four chapters, in the fifth and sixth the pilcrow calls immediate attention, respectively, to the seven planets and to four groups of nations and cities outside of France. Isolating and opening the categories of people and nations onto a greater space implied by the blank area of the page, the printer’s mark indicates a visual pause, possibly a silence discerned or heard in the mind’s ear that extends between the places to which the words refer. Where the fifth chapter begins with Saturn (under whose sign are gens melancholicques and others who would do well to bet on the presence of God) and ends with the moon, the paragraph beginning A la Lune [Fig. 15.4] shifts from the proper name to a common and generally pejorative variant, a catch-all for the fools and sorry souls consigned to live under its jurisdiction: “¶ A la Lune / comme bisouars / lunatiques / folz / ecervelez / acriatres / esventes / courratiers / postez / naquetz / verriers / estadiotz / nauront ceste annee gueres darrest” [fol. 4 v; emphasis mine]. Lunatics are associated with the folz, one of whom was first seen in the woodcut and then heard in the words of the prologue, and by virtue of orthography acariastres seem to act as they do because of the way the stars—astres—are written into the word that describes them.14 In the context the pilcrow becomes an ideogram whose form doubles the figure of the moon in the upper right-hand corner of the cut on the title-page [Fig. 15.5]. In a world obsessed with divination and prognostication, in which everything perpetually becomes a sign or portent of something else or other, in

14

For Randle Cotgrave acariastre is translated as “Harebraind, rash, brainlesse, hastie, furious, unreasonable, inconsiderate one that is swaied by his owne madwill, franticke humor.”

at the foot of the letter, la pantagrueline prognostication

figure 15.4

Pantagrueline Prognostication, end of chapter five [fol. iv v]

figure 15.5

Pantagrueline Prognostication, title page, detail

391

typography of the 1530s the pilcrow is a highly conventional marker that signals a momentary a pause for readers who must look both at an audience while reading aloud. Altered, it becomes something else in La Pantagrueline prognostication. In its resemblance to the moon on the title-page the pilcrow clearly “signifies more than it says.”15 A lunar sign, it suggests that folly is thus everywhere, but most visibly marked in the ultimate paragraph of the sixth chapter.

15

How word-signs “signify” is at crux of Rabelais’s art of prediction that is echoed in Mon-

392

conley

The moon crowns the list of planets at the end of chapter five. It casts a shadow upon the five bundles of nations and cities in the final paragraphs of the Prognostication. It might be folly to stretch a point—but why not passer oultre—by noting that by chance or destiny the incipit of chapter six, “Le noble Royaulme de France / prosperera et triumphera ceste annee en tous plaisirs & delices tellement que les nations estranges voulentiers se y retireront” (fol. iv. v, emphasis added), begins not with a pilcrow but an upper-case roman L. The majuscule announces exactly what the same letter inaugurating the preceding chapter had not—where it was stated that the greatest folly of the world is to believe that the signs in the heavens favor the kings and nobles rather than the poor and impoverished. “La plus grande folie du monde est de penser quil y ayt des astres pour les Roys/Papes/et gros seigneurs/plustost que pour les pouvres et suffreteux …” (fol. iv. v, emphasis added). At its beginning “De l’ estat daulcuns pays” takes up the words of the prologue: the voice states that France, in view of its copious and angelic harvests of wine, will prosper in what seems to be sunlight, far from the shadows of the moon, a diurnal world casts its rays upon less fortunate regions (into which “les nations estranges voulentiers se y retireront”). In the luminous description we discover, as we do at the outset of the first chapter of Pantagruel, that by reference to a turnip or radish native to the Limousin (une rabe), Rabelais sows the letters of his name in the sundrenched furrows of his own cornucopian sentence:16 Petitz banquetz/petitz esbatements milles ioyeusetes se y feront ou ung chascun prendre plaisir, on ny veit oncques tant de vins ny plus frians force rabes en Lymosin / force chataignes en Perigort / et Dauphine / force osyves en Languedoc / force poyssons en la mer / forces estoilles au ciel / force sel en Brouage / plante de bledz/ legumaiges / fructaiges / jardinages/ beurres / laictaiges / nulle peste / nulle guerre / nul enemy / bren de pouuvrete / bren de melancholie / et ces vieux doubles ducatz / nobles

16

taigne’s famous remark to the effect that his words [paroles] “signifient plus qu’elles ne disent,” in Essais, eds. Pierre Villey and V.L. Saulnier (Paris: 1965), 873. See Jean Céard and Jean-Claude Margolin, Rébus de la Renaissance: Des images qui parlent, v. 1 (Paris: 1986), who remind us that where the rebus and hieroglyph are at stake, “the ‘reader’ or ‘partner’ of the ‘inventor’ ” has to have “the capacity of identification of the whole [that] depends essentially on agility of wit, intuition or the power of his or her imagination” (84). Cotgrave: “Rabe: f. A Rape, or turnep; a round Limosin Raddish. Rabiere: f. A plot, or bed of Rapes, or Turneps.” In Pantagruel Rabelais tips his name when describing the genealogy of his hero, in the second sentence of “De l’ origine et antiquité du grand Pantagruel” (oc 217). See my Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: 2011), 49–50.

at the foot of the letter, la pantagrueline prognostication

393

a la rose / angelotz / et moutons a la grant laine / retoureront en usance avecques plante de Seraphz / et escuz au soleil / fol. iv v-fol. v r

France, proclaims the speaker, will be rife with agricultural and monetary riches, but before it can be mistaken for Utopia, he recalls that in summertime fleas and mosquitoes infest a bled de campagne, a place called La Devinière (near Chinon), the orthography of which meshes a toponym referring to the hidden author’s birthplace (in minuscule) with inflexions of prophecy, prediction and divination: Toutesfoy sur le milieu de Leste / sera a redoubter quelque venue de pusses noyres et cheussons de la deviniere. Adeo nichil [sic] est ex omni parte beatum. Mays il les faudra les brider a force de collations vespertines. f. v r

Contrary to the description of the fruits of France abounding in the first and unmarked paragraph, the five nations and regions that follow (each signaled by the pilcrow) have less to offer: (1) Italy, Romania, Naples, and Sicily will be impoverished at Lent; (2) the northern countries may thrive but ought to be watchful of panhandling preachers [porteurs de rogatons]; (3) Spain, Castille, Portugal, and Aragon will undergo sudden drought; (4) the British Isles and cities of the Hanseatic League will not live joyously or in the temperament of Pantagruel; (4) Muscovites, Indians, Persians, and Ethiopians (troglodytes) will be afflicted with diarrhea; (5) more generally, swarms of horse flies will pester hypocrites, and (6), for what might befall Austrians, Hungarians, and Turks only time (la venue des boyteux) will tell. Here ends the chapter, and so also the Prognostication itself, in anticipation of an unpredictable future, that in its first iteration gives way to more assuring visual sign arching back to its unstated (but visibly marked) origin in Lyon. The edition that carries the woodcut from La Grand nef des folz prints in the blank space below the final words an emblematic tailpiece from the studio of François Juste [Fig. 15.6]. Standing on a flowered field on a blank base, two putti carry a horn of plenty in one arm while with the other they hold erect a shield that in other works in which the escutcheon is placed displays a ciphered or interlaced letter combining the first initials of the editor’s name and, below, Juste’s full name in roman majuscule. The play of the tailpiece and the text implies that the riches of France enumerated in the first paragraph are made manifest in the horns of

394

conley

figure 15.6

Pantagrueline Prognostication, final page and tailpiece [fol. v r]

plenty associated with the author’s editor and bookseller. In sum, despite the apparent simplicity of the formatting and disposition of the title-page and text of the Prognostication, just as Rabelais remarks in Gargantua in commenting on the richly enigmatic character of hieroglyphs in Le Songe de Poliphile or in Horapollo, innocuous and highly conventional image-signs are constellate in the work, dotting it with visible enigmas in concord with what the narrative describes.

2

A Book-Object and a Chart: Lorenzo Spirito’s Livre de passetemps (1532)

Two concluding observations can be essayed. First, the form and content of the first iteration of the Prognostication merits comparison to a work of similar grist, François Juste’s issue of a French translation of Lorenzo Spirito’s Le Livre de passetemps, a piece of ephemera that ultimately comes into view in the Tiers Livre.17 Published almost synchronously with Rabelais’s pamphlet, it belongs to 17

Le Livre de passe temps de la fortune des dez Ingenieusement compile par maistre Laurens lesperit pour responses de vingt questions par plusieurs coustumeement faictes & desirees savoir qui sont specifiees au retour de ce feuillet en la roe de fortune … ([Lyon] Françoys Juste: 1532) (Houghton Library Typ 515.32.804).

at the foot of the letter, la pantagrueline prognostication

395

the prognostic genre without placing stress on the broader or disquieting implications of divination. It may be that the creative or affirmative doubt manifest in the Prognostication—“ce que sera dit au par sus/sera passe au gros tamys a tors et a travers/ et par adventure adviendra ou par adventure nadviendra pas” [fol. 2 r]—counters the game of divination in Spirito’s manual that moves from chance to resolution. In what would be an early instance of “Un coup de dés,” Spirito’s book prides itself in its practical orientation. Resembling a board game, the book invites its player-readers to roll three dice in pursuit of answers to any of the twenty-two decisive questions that they might wish to ask of themselves (if one will have a happy life, if a man’s wife is good and as she ought to be, if the person who is playing the game is loved, etc.). The explanation is given in the title printed in black and red ink, below which, disposed in two columns to approximate a square, figures an octosyllabic poem of four eight-line stanzas comprising a captatio (replete with affected modesty) in which the author avows how much pleasure the game can afford its user: Car cecy nest fait que pour jeu (col. 1, l. 16) [Fig. 15.7]. Owing much to Jean Molinet’s acrobatic verse of Burgundian signature that can be read multilaterally (left to right and from top to bottom), the title-page of the Passetemps signals that it is a jeu d’espace, a colorfully formatted textmap printed in two inks, the front matter of which stands above a headpiece that prints in red what was missing from the tailpiece of Rabelais’s pamphlet.18 On the other side of the title-page a woodcut displays the goddess of chance in the frame of a wheel of fortune [Fig. 15.8]. Her navel approximately at the hub, she holds two banderoles that to the left and right extend over the arc of the wheel. In the banderole to the right, on the descending arc, is printed “Sans arrester incessamment” while on the other side, inverted, are the words “Tousjours suis en movement.” A king is seated on the top (at 12:00) while to the left a man clings to the wheel (at approximately the 9:00 hour) from which on the right (at 3:00), upside down, a hirsute figure is about to fall. A smaller figure that would be a devil stands inverted at the bottom (6:00). Four banderoles in the spandrels contain the questions, coordinated with the names of kings to whose images the player reports on the following five pages. Each of the twenty-two monarchs is associated with the name of a flower, each representation of which stands against a stippled 18

A similar design is found on the title-page of Juste’s edition (1530) of La Grand nef des folz (see the version available on Gallica or at the University of Vermont Library, PT1509.N5 1530). An ornate border reminiscent of a book of hours enframes a rubricated title set above Juste’s device. As it is presented in Spirito’s Passetemps, printed in black and red ink, the date is broken into two halves (15 and 30) set to the left and right of the escutcheon.

396

figure 15.7

conley

Lorenzo Spirito, Le livre de passe temps (Lyon: François Juste, 1532), title-page

at the foot of the letter, la pantagrueline prognostication

figure 15.8

Le livre de passe temps, verso of title-page

397

398

conley

background in a square at the center of the twenty pages that follow. Divided into six columns, the latter print shows ten orders of three dice in units that illustrate 1200 possible combinations. On the upper border of the frame on the top of each page are printed the names of the flowers, followed by the questions that were found in the four banderoles adjacent to the wheel of fortune. Printed below the figure of the dice are instructions that tell the player to go to any of the twelve signs of the zodiac and classical deities at the hub of twenty wheels on the ten folios below. Each wheel contains a circular river that divides twenty-eight numbered units with a text (in Italian) naming a given prophet on one side from as many on the other (that yield a sum of 56). With the numbers and the names of twenty prophets the player then consults any of the forty following pages (two per prophet) under whose name 56 rhymed couplets are printed on each, the total of which is 2000. A sum of popular wisdom, much like Erasmus’s collection of adages, the octosyllabic couplets provide answers to the initial question that has led the player to find the flower and the king, to roll the dice, consult the wheel, retrieve a prophet and a number, and ultimately obtain a proverb, e.g., for a woman playing the game, “Ton mary est trop dangereux/Car il se trouve en trop de lieux,” or for anyone who is frustrated either in life or possibly by the game itself: “Bien brief fineras ton mal[h]eur/Et perviendras en grant honneur,” and so on. As shown by the lists of questions and their deities in the spandrels of the title-page, the book is designed to be read from all corners. Given the wheel of fortune on the verso and the circles of the zodiac and classical deities in the middle, it requires its player-reader to handle the object, to turn it about and around, to flip its pages forwards and backwards. A pre-modern garden of forking paths, the Passetemps ultimately becomes a dictionary of proverbs and memorable aphorisms. A thesaurus and a compendium of popular wisdom belonging to the arts of memory, it qualifies both as an elegantly fashioned diagram—an intermediate or transitional object—and an inventory of what is possible. In turning metaphysics into a game, settling the unsettling questions concerning faith and doubt of the kind that one of the bien yvres of Gargantua had addressed in exclaiming Dieu faict les planetes et nous faisons les platz netz, it differs saliently from the Prognostication and its progeny. Yet, as a work of uncommon graphic design, it turns signs into plot-points for any number of spiritual and spatial itineraries. The irresolution owing to the wisdom of lunacy in the first published work attributed to Rabelais appears domesticated when it is emended and expanded in later editions. In its last and final form, appended to Juste’s issue of Rabelais’s revised edition of Pantagruel in 1542, the Prognostication is of vastly different aspect. The title, Pantagrueline Prognostication, certaine, veritable, & infallible.

at the foot of the letter, la pantagrueline prognostication

399

Pour Lan perpetuel. Nouvuellemeut [sic] composee au prouffit & advisement de gens estourdis & musars de nature, now printed in roman type, stands directly over what had been the legend under the woodcut in the edition of 1532.19 Removing the shard of dialogue (“qui en a si sen defface …” that signaled interlocution in the image), set in cul-de-lampe, also in roman, it reads: “Du nombre Dor non dicitur, Ie nen trouve point ceste annee quelque calculation que ien aye faict, passons oultre. Verte folium.” On the page that follows (fol. 136 r), in lettre bâtarde, a slightly different dedication that calls greater attention to the savior (“Au liseur benivole Salut:/Paix en Jesus le Christ”) is placed over a woodcut portraying a gentleman addressing a woman who is writing at her desk in an interior in whose background, in another room, stands a domestic. Apparently inserted for decorative reasons, having nothing to do with the context of the fool and savant in the cut taken from the Nef des folz, the image appears selected to cue on the dedication so that either the woman or the gentleman can be imagined uttering its words. Set in bâtarde, each chapter begins from an upper-case roman lettrine. The layout resembles the graphic design of Pantagruel, the book implied to be its partner. Pilcrows are removed, except in the explicit where two are added to fill out a line to respect the perspective of words set in cul-de-lampe. Distributed over ten folios, eminently discernible, the material appears printed for the purpose of silent reading. Arranged in the style of the edition it accompanies, it is one with the tenor of the new title of Pantagruel, announced to have been formerly composed ( jadis composé) by M. Alcofribas. The Prognostication, now “revue et augmentée,” becomes a scientific or historical object: a document of times past and not, as its graphics had first shown it to be, a political or situational composition immersed in its moment. Now the fulcrum of a pendant design set in cul-de-lampe, “Verte folium” implies that by turning a page the reader goes from one typographical style to another, and not from folly to wisdom and back and forth over and over again. The roman font of the title-page displays a paradoxical modernity of attic or classical letters that immediately give way to the work itself in lettre bâtarde. Like Pantagruel, that is broken into paragraphs in emulation of Denis de Harsey’s edition (Lyon, 1537), omitting pilcrows, chapters five and six of the new version of the Prognostication separate the planets and places into paragraphs.20 Insofar as the two intercalated

19 20

Reference is made to the copy in the Gordon Collection available online at the University of Virginia (Gordon 1542.R26py.2). In 1542, notes Henry-Jean Martin, concurring with Mireille Huchon, that in his critical editions of Gargantua and Pantagruel (to which the Prognostication is attached) François

400

conley

vignettes (fol. 136 r and 137 v) have little to do with divination and prediction, they make clear the boundaries of the chapters where they are placed. The crammed or compressed lines in the text of 1532 that seem to run the letters of individual words into each other are now opened, aerated as it were, ostensibly so as not to encourage productive misprision. Attenuating protracted and slow decipherment of the material, the print is less apt to require readers of a certain age, as the speaker had stressed at the end of the prologue, to “put on their spectacles” in order to “carefully weigh” its words. The unreliable tenor of the text as it had been printed in 1532, shown in the relation of the woodcut to the discourse, is visibly reduced. In the new design the dialogic aspect that had mixed different voices gives way to a clearer exposition and thus appreciation of the work’s inestimable lexical wealth. Graphic evidence shows that in 1542 the “experience” of the Pantagrueline prognostication is far different from what it had been ten years earlier. In its first iteration, when aligned directly with the Grant nef des folz and to a degree with the Encomium moriae, and when seen in proximity to a work such as Le Livre de passetemps, standing at the threshold of an uncertain future, the prognostication’s embrace of “lunacy” and folly inspires a sense of creative doubt. Beginning with the recto-verso design that juxtaposes the woodcut with the serious and playful tone of the Erasmian prologue, the form of the pamphlet’s content stages an open-ended and unfinished dialogue vital to any and all consideration of the future.21 For the author and the editors of the later editions, what might have been the richly unsettling experience of the Prognostication in its initial form is either overlooked or is reshaped to become something other. A piece of writing of times past, in its new form the work is experienced as a piece of history related to the genesis of Pantagruel. Looking at the editions

21

Juste, following Denis de Harsy in his work of 1537, is eagerly clarifying the text by removing diacritical signs and by dividing it into paragraphs. He also took a lead in removing the more traditional pilcrows to give the work a more modern—and it can be added for the sake of the argument of this paper, a more sensible—appearance. In La Naissance du livre moderne: Mise en page et mise en texte du livre français (xive–xviie siècles) (Paris: 2000), 223–224. Like the propos des bien yvres in Gargantua, the verbal kyrielles (“A Sol somme Boteleurs de foin, portefaix, gueux de lhostiere, Gaignedeniers, Ravaudeurs, desgresseurs de bonetz, emboureurs de bastz, loqueteurs,” etc.) can be seen as graphic signs of printed noise that when emitted would bring order to a world, especially at the time of an eclipse, whose rhythm is “out of joint.” Intended “to frighten, to scare away the animal or the monster that will devour the celestial body,” noise calls attention to “apparition of a social discontinuity.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques 1: Le cru et le cuit (Paris: 1962), 293 and 344.

at the foot of the letter, la pantagrueline prognostication

401

from where we are today, given the impact of the digital revolution, we now have the wherewithal to experience the appeal and attraction of the early editions in their printed form and, further, to expand and extend the delight of our first and ever-ongoing encounters with Rabelais.

chapter 16

Rabelais and Language Marie-Luce Demonet

1

Modelling Novels with Language

When he published his first novel, Pantagruel, Rabelais offered multiple visions of human language in all its potential: polyglossia, play with diverse tongues (in the episodes of the Écolier limousin as well as the meeting between Panurge and Pantagruel), including imaginary idioms, sign language and gestures, nonsense (the Kissass and Sniffshit lawsuit), endless lists, the rhetoric of seduction, of war, of letter-writing, of polemics, or of insult. He avoided no register: from the most vulgar to the most learned, from everyday and market-place language to the most elaborate formulae, the language of the arts (philosophy, mathematics, letters), and of the professional faculties (Theology, Medicine, Law). He played with the vocabulary of the sciences, from the most explicit to the utmost obscurity of occultism. Gargantua renewed the masterstroke, while mocking the prophetic style (“Antidoted Frigglefraggles,” enigmas), the scholastic discourse (Janotus’s declamation), petrarchism (scatological poetry composed by the little giant), and the elegant concions (harangues) of war. Wordplay begins with the first title-pages: Alcofribas might be, in Arabic, “the distiller of alcohol,” and soon Rabelais coins the name of a new philosophical sect, “Pantagruelism” (Gargantua 1535). More than ten years later, Book Three (1546) offers a major theory of language origins—i.e., conventional and social—with a novel about language, almost entirely built on dialogues dealing with the question of marriage, with episodes that stage a thorough semiotics of interpretation (the Sybil, Trouillogan, Nazdecabre, Triboulet), with puns based on linguistic moods (interrogatory, negative, injunctive, hypothetical), dealing with treacherous future contingents that flirt with astrology and predestination, and with the modalities of enunciation: alethic, epistemic, deontic. As for Book Four (1552), in the Frozen Words episode, it explains the very function of language: the freezing of concepts through voice and written word, and their restitution with the thawing process of utterance and reading. Every island featured in the voyage has its own linguistic function, adapted to its temper, and signaled by its Hebrew or Greek name: jokes and phrases (Ennasins / Alliances), nothingness (Ruach), excremental alterity (Farouche), hypocrisy

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_018

rabelais and language

403

(Chaneph), theft (Ganabins), the purpose of each encounter thus being defined, in part, by the islands’ names. The novel contains also a parody of naturalistic etymology, in the manner of Plato’s Cratylus, reducing this thesis to a childish rebus.1 The set of chapters published under the title Book Five (1564) seems to magnify all these linguistic schemes, echoing the Goths, Papegaux, Cagots, and Clergaux in the first sixteen chapters of the Île Sonnante (the Ringing Island, 1562), before the characters walk down, in the ultimate chapters, towards the grotesque bacchanalia and the breaking out of the panompheus word: “Trinch,” itself a message uttered in an oracular poem, is visually bottled in a calligramme. However, Rabelais discarded this linguistic katabasis, so that the narrative shifts to another and more enigmatic ending, built on oral language properties and multiple meanings: “Sela, Buvons” (“Sela, let’s drink”), the final words of Book Four.

2

Sign Theory and Linguistic Fictions

Rabelais’s works contain all the elements of a theory of language that inherits the tradition of grammar and logic of late scholasticism, whose rudimenta or skillful commentaries colleges and faculties of Arts still taught everywhere in Europe. This high-level description of signs was submitted to simplifications and developments the humanists integrated into their teaching from the 1520s on and particularly with the Royal Readers in the following decade. The Aristotelian base that distinguishes between the thing (res), the concept, the uttered word (vox), and the written word (scriptum) was still valid, up to the Logique de Port-Royal and the Enlightenment. This description merged the Stoic and Galenic theory of signs, its religious version by St Augustine, who argued that every sign (including the linguistic sign) is a res that signifies to somebody, installing the signification within a process of communication and deciphering, as experimented in the Third Book, laden with a very modern relevance.

1 François Rigolot, Poétique et onomastique: L’exemple de la Renaissance (Geneva: 1977). Kurt Baldinger, Études autour de Rabelais, (er) 23 (Geneva: 1990). Baldinger, Etymologisches Wörterbuch zu Rabelais (Gargantua) (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie) 306 (Berlin: 2001). Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris: 1992). Mireille Huchon, “Variations rabelaisiennes sur l’imposition du nom,” in Prose et prosateurs de la Renaissance (Paris: 1998), 93–100.

404

demonet

Late medieval semiotics offered several tree-shaped sign distinctions, such as icon, symbol, indicium (clue), signal, with several degrees of certainty (from the doubtful to the quite certain), and a time-relevant table described by Galen: prognostic signs, diagnostic (or deictic), and “memorative” signs. Rabelais was the editor of Hippocrates’ Prognostics, the same year as he published Pantagruel, the mocking Pantagruélines prognostications, and the letters by Giovanni Manardo, the Italian physician he admired. These learned works show, along with the handwritten annotations of his own copy of Galen, that Rabelais was well aware of the new attention given to medical semeiotikè, especially to the notion of symptom that he adapted for French. His medical almanacs prove that his conception of prognosis is limited to a reasonable and conjectural astrology, irrelevant for individuals, thus not relevant for Panurge’s dilemma: “Shall I marry, or not?” There is no certainty in the field of language either, despite the centuries of disputes between theologians to give the most exact definitions of signs, because the very nature of the sacraments was at stake. In Rabelais’s times, many men who favored the reform of the Church wrote also against the magic nature of sacraments, arguing that their function is not to transform or operate, but only to signify, going back to a purely linguistic or logical approach: the Eucharist is thus a deictic and memorative sign rather than a powerful charm or a change of substance (transubstantiation). The use of language could be suspected of heresy at any level, from the everyday swearword that became blasphemy, to disrespect for Church institutions such as the Sorbonne, or for lucrative practices such as the selling of “pardons” (indulgences), and the pilgrimages. Rabelais did not ignore the dangerous context of his own parrhesia, the freedom of speech among the Cynics, that of the so-called “Parrhisiens,” and he reduced the risk of major errors when he revised his first editions of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1542). Despite this self-censorship, despite the more allegorical and oblique way of criticizing the politics and immorality of his time, his novels did not escape the Guichet (the Wicket) of Condemnation. Among the entities of language, the medieval metaphysicians, and especially the followers of Thomas of Aquinas, divided the entia (beings) into entia realia and entia rationis (mental entities), which exist only in the human mind. Among the latter, they isolated the fictitious entities, which they admitted— albeit reluctantly—to be metaphysical objects from a philosophical perspective. The Scotists and Terminists developed a reflection on possible worlds in the realm of logic, not of metaphysics; meanwhile the most radical Nominalists connected the res to the words inside the discourse itself as closely as possible. The Oxonian Modists bequeathed the “potential” mood to De emendata

rabelais and language

405

structura Latini sermonis (1524) by Thomas Linacre, a physician Rabelais mentions and most certainly read.2 These trends, despite their divergences, provided the best conditions for a new readership for the novels and the diverse universe of fiction that they favored, which were neither serious treatises, nor formal poetry, even though novels such as Pantagruel were included in the vast domain of poetics.3 Rabelais created mental entities, such as his characters, some of whom were close to real people; one example would be Friar John, modeled after the actual Franciscan Jean Thénaud, and after one or several Benedictine monks of his neighborhood. He also created plants, such as the “Pantagruelion,” a chimaera composed of hemp, linen, and papyrus, an actual allegory of paper.4 It would be easy to ascribe this faculty of combining several entities to language, but the notion of hybridity is not congruent with what we read: of course, there are many idioms Rabelais uses, mixes, and invents, but he does not create a chimeric tongue like Thomas More’s Utopian: his French language is contemporary, including dialects, regional variants, styles, and vocabulary, adapted to the narrative, to the narrators (Alcofribas, Panurge, Pantagruel), to the characters, according to the prepon, the decorum or verisimilitude recommended by all the Academic authors. The many languages Rabelais uses build a diegesis, the coherence of which is more noticeable in the Tiers and Quart Livres, as they drop the schema of the heroic vitae (lives) in order to follow the impulse of language itself. Speech performances in Pantagruel and Gargantua are striking as showpieces, but Rabelais operates as if their overall meaning was given, to him and to the reader, in the following novels. Linguistic fiction is part of a fictional world, and, even if Rabelais is not the first writer to use word creation in such a universe, he includes speech magnificently in the building of an alternate world, as an element of fiction itself, neither translating into a macaronic idiolect like Folengo, nor using jargons consistently like Villon. Multilingualism is not, on first view, a new comical trick: Pathelin, farces, and mystery plays show that at the end of the 15th

2 Thomas Linacre, De emendata structura Latini sermonis (London: 1524; Paris: 1532), 19–22. 3 Demonet, “Les êtres de raison, ou les modes d’ être de la littérature,” in Res et Verba in der Renaissance, eds. E. Kessler and I. MacLean (Wiesbaden: 2002), 177–195. 4 Michel Jeanneret, Le défi des signes: Rabelais et la crise de l’interprétation de la Renaissance (Orléans: 1994); Demonet, “Polysémie et pharmacie dans le Tiers Livre,” in Rabelais et le Tiers Livre, ed. E. Kotler (Nice: 1996), 61–84; Louis-Georges Tin, “Qu’est-ce que le Pantagruelion?,” er 39 (2000): 125–135; Tin, “Le Pantagruelion: Réflexions sur la notion d’exégèse littéraire,” in Rabelais et la question du sens. Actes du colloque international de Cerisy-La-Salle, août 2000, eds. J. Céard, M.-L. Demonet, and S. Geonget, (er) 49 (Geneva: 2011), 113–124.

406

demonet

century the recipe was still efficient.5 Rabelais inserts this linguistic creativity and the addiction to swearwords as a feature of the characters Panurge and Friar John, who express, much more than their masters Gargantua and Pantagruel, the vivacity of the vernacular. In the Brief declaration, Rabelais imitates the authentic lexicographers while glossing his own neologisms and popular phrases, and displaying the infinite creativeness of the commentary and interpretation themselves. The freedom of inventing words, worlds, and tongues is supported by his theory of the origins of language: conventional, social, as Aristotle and medieval philosophers assumed, but also individual, especially by the writer who is a creator, making idioms “à plaisir” (at pleasure), according to his “desire-pleasuredecision,” as we could translate the Latin expression ad placitum. There is no nature in language, except in the faculty of speaking, voice, and body language, but the poet is like a god in his own world of fiction. Etymology can be shaped according to the necessity of narrative, of a character, or of the plot. The writer can inject in his names morality, mischief, good or bad temper (Picrochole), knowledge (Epistemon), thirst (Pantagruel), as the Prophets used to do in the Bible:6 son père luy imposa tel nom: car Panta en grec vault autant à dire comme tout, et Gruel en langue Hagarène vault autant comme alteré, voulant inferer, que à l’heure de sa nativité, le monde estoit tout alteré. P ii, 224; cw 142

A language is natural when it is the mother tongue. The Écolier limousin (P vi) threatens the constitution of the new illustrious vernacular when he mangles Latin and French in a pedant schoolboy idiom, as ragged as his pants “à queue de merlus, et non à pleins fonds,” and his periphrases are awkward imitations of Latin orators, used to impress his audience. If fear leads the poor Écolier to burst into his lingua limosina, it does not mean that his regional idiom is to be despised, but that the mother tongue is always better than a forged sociolect: “A cette heure parles-tu naturellement” (“Now you speak naturally”) is a positive assessment.

5 Jelle Koopmans, “Rabelais et l’ esprit de la farce,” in Les Grands Jours de Rabelais en Poitou, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget, (er) 43 (Geneva: 2002), 299–311, and his contribution to the present volume. 6 Gérard Genette, Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie (Paris: 1976); François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: 1972).

rabelais and language

407

Many dialects could claim they were the main French language, but none could be considered more natural than another. Rabelais’s French is not the expression of a norm. On the contrary, he invites the reader to enjoy the differences and variations, archaisms of his region, and neologisms of his own. His narrator says that we must use the ordinary language, without saying where it comes from, and who the best speakers are. He imposed no linguistic “soil,” no “court” French. Panurge, by contrast, re-centers his polyglossia on the French of the “Garden of France,” Touraine, the province already considered as preserving the best French spoken at that time, because the monarchs had made their residence there, an excellence confirmed by the statement of an English grammarian, John Palsgrave (1530).7 Gargantua’s genealogy (P i) gives some erratic clues on linguistic genealogy: some names show a fake Hebrew origin (Chalbroth), mixed with French roots (Faribroth) and mock-epic heroes (Fierabras). His giant ancestor escaped the disaster of the Flood, in a parody of the serious historiography spread by Nanni of Viterbo and Lemaire de Belges, who forged a Noachic origin for all nations and tongues. The inscription on Gargantua’s grave is allegedly Etruscan (still undeciphered), wears a clear and emblematic gobelet (tumbler), and declares a deictic “hic bibitur” (G i, 10). The question of the eldest tongues of humanity was a crucial point, because all Christian monarchies would support any argument that would strengthen their power, relying on the antiquity of their nations and tongues, and encouraging a propagandist writing of history.8 Tongues were mixed and confused after Babel? Rabelais mixes them as early as his first novel and shows the very active part of individual initiative and of social consensus. As much as Noah was the inventor of piot (an Occitan word for wine), Pantagruel will be the inventor of the “Pantagruelion,” i.e., the paper on which books are written or printed. Wine (inspiration), paper, and language are the necessary ingredients for writing.

7 John Palsgrave, L’ Esclarcissement de la langue françoyse (London: 1530), French trans. and ed. S. Baddeley (Paris: 2003), 406. 8 Claude-Gilbert Dubois, Mythe et langage au xvie siècle (Bordeaux: 1970); Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History and Nationalism (Lincoln: 1989); Jean Céard, “De Babel à la Pentecôte: La transformation du mythe de la confusion des langues au xvie siècle,” bhr 42–43 (1980): 577–594.

408 3

demonet

Meeting Tongues, Mixing Languages

The fictional dimension of language is spectacular in the linguistic encounter of P ix, but chapter vi had already prepared the reader to admit the importance of the mother tongue that the Écolier had been forced to let go. There is a likeness between his Ur-sprache (original language), the Limousin, and one of the thirteen tongues (only nine in 1532) that Panurge speaks in front of Pantagruel and his companions: Rabelaisian Utopian, one of the imaginary tongues, spoken after Hebrew and Greek, and before Latin. The samples of all the vernaculars could be provided by the foreign ‘nations’ of the universities, Poitiers, Angers, Orleans, and mostly Paris. The French nation of students included the Central and Southern provinces, Basque and Limousin included. The Picardic nation hosted the Northern dialects, and Parisian French was itself heterogeneous, depending on its suburbs.9 But nobody reasonably could handle so many idioms, except in a novel. Even if there are only three imaginary tongues, rare idioms could also provoke the same effect as nonsensical, diabolic, and lowly languages.10 Indeed, Antipodean, Lanternois and Utopian are fictive and hybrid, making up chimeric samples of tongues that look like the “Silenes” of Gargantua’s prologue, or impossible fictive objects such as “harpies, satyres, oysons bridés, lievres cornuz, canes bastées, boucs volans, cerfz limmoniers et autres telles peinctures contrefaictes à plaisir pour exciter le monde à rire” (oc 5; cw 3). As monstrous combinations, they are part of an aesthetic of medieval and Renaissance grotesque. Despite the lengthy postponing of answers to Pantagruel’s questions, Panurge’s linguistic exhibition provokes laughter, and moreover says something about the expressivity of every idiom when somebody is hungry: German is periphrastic, Italian proverbial and medical, Scottish flatters and moralizes. Basque, a precocious apparition in literature, is more direct and demanding with imperative moods and daring advices. Dutch says politely what German had developed, Spanish is evangelical and bombastic, and Danish uses rustic metaphors. Each vernacular tongue contains the definition of its psychological features (more or less polite or rude, warlike, or effeminate), just like ‘climate theory’ describes the differences between nations and tongues.11

9 10 11

Anthony Lodge, A Sociolinguistic History of Parisian French (Cambridge, Eng.: 2004). Emile Pons, “Les langages imaginaires dans le voyage utopique: Les ‘jargons’ de Panurge dans Rabelais,” Revue de littérature comparée 11 (1931): 185–218. Demonet, “Les climats linguistiques,” in Langues et identités culturelles en Europe, xvie– xviie siècles, vol. 1, ed. M.-S. Ortola et M. Roig Miranda (Nancy: 2005), 3–24.

rabelais and language

409

The same process affects the old idioms: Greek practices rhetorical amplification, well adapted to the purpose. Latin is still more overblown and declamatory, with pathetic effects and invectives like Cicero’s, as reflected in a proverb already commented on by Erasmus: “ventre affamé n’a pas d’ oreilles,” “an empty belly has no ears.” Hebrew corresponds to what is expected, a brief enunciation and sober style: nothing is lacking, nothing is superfluous, without figures, except one Biblical and ironic quotation, “car il est écrit,” that Epistemon acknowledges as “rhetorically pronounced.” This is amusing, because nobody knew exactly how Hebrew should be uttered, the tradition differing from Ashkenazic to Sephardic.12 Panurge reduces the demand to the strict minimum, after the traditional salute (shalom lecha, “peace be with you”): no edition of Pantagruel gives the same transcription of shalom, and we can read sholom (1532), scholam (1533), scholom (1537); the spelling of the last version (1542), scolom, seems the least accurate. Far removed from the glossolalia of the Gospel, in his brilliant performance of polyglossia Panurge stresses the fundamentals of human dialogue: to consider the communication data, instead of asking for identity before rescuing an obviously distressed individual. What is language for? Exchanging information, expressing affections: it is human language, instable, chaotic, but living. Each imaginary tongue can be matched with a linguistic group, already identified since Dante: the pseudo-Arabic Antipodean, the pseudo-Gothic Lanternois-Patelinois, and, more interestingly, the para-Occitan Utopian. French words are interspersed in all of them, often dealing with sexuality ( jocststzampenards) and with the wine of the Rabelaisian country (Gravot, Chavigny, Pomardière, Deviniere pres Nays, Bouille, “vin ders Cordelis”). Instead of having a French basis scattered with Oriental borrowings, the process is the reverse one: the remains of an improbable primitive and very natural French emerge out of these strange terms. Utopian can be matched with Occitan dialects because of the predominant phoneme [u] (P ix, 249; cw 165). It might be the reason why Pantagruel declares: “J’entends ce me semble, dist Pantagruel: car ou c’ est langaige de mon pays de Utopie, ou bien luy ressemble quant au son” (“it sounds very like it”) (ibid.), an assertion where the coordination ou, and the Greek pronunciation of Ou-topie, could be signs of this familiarity. The reader recalls the authentic ou of the Écolier limousin: dicou, adiouda, dious, touquas grou. It is worth noting that the verb adiouda (“help”) is also one of the few words in

12

Sophie Kessler-Mesguisch, Les études hébraïques en France, de François Tissard à Richard Simon (1508–1680) (Geneva: 2013), 53 and 90.

410

demonet

the Roman vernacular (perhaps a Poitou dialect), preserved in the Serments de Strasbourg manuscripts, an exceptional document the humanist antiquarians would acknowledge soon afterwards as a possible vestige of the old French tongue. The insults in Gascon that close the prologue of Pantagruel come back in the Third Book, and Rabelais seems to like in particular the Occitan curse “vit d’aze (de Provence)” Many authors knew that Dante and Petrarch were aware of the importance of the troubadour dialects, thought to be the origin of the Tuscan language and love poetry.13 Rabelais reverses some of the linguistic beliefs of his time: whereas his mentor Guillaume Budé and the theologian Charles de Bovelles sought eagerly to find Greek roots to many French words, in order to give their mother tongue some antiquity, Rabelais takes many Greek terms to enrich his French and alter both languages, adapting them through calques, transcribing others in Latin or in Greek characters (Loxias, diabolos), and printing German words in Gothic type.14

4

Grotesque copia

The Brief declaration is a kind of short breviary for Pantagruelists. This lexical supplement to the Fourth Book, long discarded by some scholars because of its doubtful authenticity, is again considered a key commentary of the novel, even if Rabelais deludes the reader with some inappropriate definitions.15 He often copies medieval and Renaissance lexicons, including the dictionaries that Erasmus ridiculed (Catholicon, Papias). Some of his pastiches draw on the 13

14

15

Jean-François Courouau, Moun lengatge bèl: Les choix linguistiques minoritaires en France, 1490–1660 (Geneva: 2008), 61–63; Courouau, Et non autrement: Marginalisation et résistance des langues de France (xvie–xviie siècle) (Geneva: 2012), 123–144; Demonet, “La langue des troubadours comme origine de la langue française (Rabelais, Fauchet, Blaise de Vigenère),” in La réception des troubadours en Languedoc et en France, xvie–xviiie siècle, eds. J.-F. Courouau and I. Luciani (Paris: 2015), 23–36; Demonet, “Languegoth et français mêlé chez Rabelais,” in Langues hybrides: expérimentations linguistiques et littéraires (xve– début xviie siècle), eds. A.-P. Pouey-Mounou and Paul J. Smith (Geneva: 2019), 331–349. Charles de Bovelles, Liber de differentia vulgarium linguarum et Gallici sermonis varietate (Paris: 1533); Guillaume Budé, De Asse (Paris: 1514); Budé, Commentarii linguae graecae (Paris: 1529); Romain Menini, Rabelais altérateur: “Graeciser en François” (Paris: 2014). Raymond Arveiller, “La Briefve Declaration est-elle de Rabelais?,”er 5 (1964): 9–10. Huchon, Rabelais grammairien: De l’ histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité, (er) 16 (Geneva: 1981). André Tournon, “La Briefve Declaration n’ est pas de Rabelais,” er 13 (1976): 133–138; Demonet, “Rabelais métalinguiste,” in Le Tiers Livre, ed. F. Giacone, (er) 37 (Geneva: 1999), 115–128.

rabelais and language

411

recent fashion for accompanying technical books with glossaries and on the self-promoting techniques of authors such as Ronsard with his Odes (1550), celebrated in learned commentaries as if they were already Virgil or Petrarch. The Brief declaration is relevant for the glosses of Hebrew: Rabelais notes that Bacbuc is an onomatopoeia (“Bouteille. du bruit qu’ elle fait quand on la vide”), an explanation taken by the Christian Hebraists from the Book of Roots by Moses Kimhi of Narbonne (12th century). It provides also translations from Italian, Latin, and Greek, shows a knowledge of metalinguistic terms, and stresses dialects, swearwords, regional vernacular, idiotisms, phrases, or personal inventions and words made “at pleasure” e.g., (decretalictones, murderers of Decretals), all registers that constitute a mostly accurate fictional lexicology. It defines the genre of the novel as “satyrique moquerie” and “fabuleuse narration,” inviting not to take its content too seriously. All the glosses refer to words already in use in the previous novels, except epode, well-known thanks to Ronsard’s Odes. Rabelais tried another lexicographic exercise in the prologue of the Fifth Book with the word fat: he explains that it is fada in “languegoth” (one of the Occitan dialects, Languedocian). It is a pleasing echo of the commentaries on poetic furor claimed by the latest literary schools, when the poet asserts that he is a tormented genius, ravished by some benevolent god. In chapter xxxiv, he recalls the etymology of Chinon as Cainon, the town of Cain, because our ancestor was also the first urban architect. This ambivalent origin, attested by the Historia Francorum of Gregorius of Tours, enables the praise of Chinon as “première ville du monde” in the Fourth Book, where Rabelais cautiously eludes the Cainite ascendance. The Brief declaration is more ambitious, pursuing in the manner of Erasmus (Adagia) the linguistic analysis of etymology, meaning changes, social origin of the phrases, figures such as syncopes and metaphors. Rabelais exonerates the use of what could be a swearword, “par la vertus Dieu,” writing that it is not a jurement (oath) but an assertion. Doing so, he underlines the actual meaning of the swearword attributed to a mysterious “frère Cambouis” (Friar Grease), a character borrowed from a scatological farce by André de La Vigne, the Farce du Meunier (the Miller’s Farce), inserted in the Mystère de Saint Martin (1496): in this mystery play Satan speaks a jargon much alike to the Limousin, and long before Geoffroy Tory’s own account of the “français écorché.”16 16

André de La Vigne, Le Mystère de Saint Martin, ed. A. Duplat (Geneva: 1979), 13–20; Geoffroy Tory, Champfleury (Paris: 1529), a8v; Demonet, “Le Théâtre de la synagogue dans l’ œuvre de Rabelais,” in Théâtre et révélation. Donner à voir et à entendre au Moyen Âge. Hommage à Jean-Pierre Bordier, ed. S. Le Briz-Orgeur (Paris: 2017), 401–416.

412

demonet

The Brief declaration looks like the “frise zoomorphe” it describes, full of hieroglyphs, imaginative drawings, a garland of free “drolleries,” these grotesque figures one could find in late medieval illuminated manuscripts.17 This linguistic knowledge challenges Guillaume Postel’s erudition, especially for Hebrew names, and defies also another member of the anti-Rabelais clan: Gabriel Du Puy-Herbault, “l’enragé Putherbe” (“the rabid Putherbe,” ql xxxii), who not only published several pages against Pantagruel’s author in his Theotimus (1549), but added a lexicographic supplement to his own diatribe, imitating Erasmus whom he criticizes for his devotion to Hellenism. Rabelais apes this glossary, mainly Greek, with his retort in the Brief declaration, and some words are common to both, like prototypon, misanthropos, ephemeris, archetypos, cynocephali, to which we could add Plutarch’s riparographus (Fifth Book), “painter of margins,” of “drolleries.”18 As early as the 1548 prologue, Rabelais curses the “Caphards, Cagotz, Matagotz, Botineurs, Papelards, Burgotz, Patespelues, Porteurs de Rogatons, Chattemittes” with their names “horrifiques, seulement oyant leur son”: they announce the “Frozen Words,” “horrifiques et assez mal plaisantes à voir” of 1552 (ql lvi). The narrator explains that the malevolent “mots de gueule” fly back to cut the throat of their authors, proving that language is a powerful weapon for revenge. In the Fourth and Fifth Books the ontological monstrosity of the perverse beings (the Physeter, the Sausages, the miraculous Decretals) is illustrated by a corresponding disproportion in language: it is either excessive, as in portmanteau words, or minute and close to infralinguistic sound, like the monosyllabic humming of the lecherous Fredons Friars (cl xxvii). The grotesque effect is that of linguistic mixture, including the “rustic” style of the naturalistic revival, and matches much more closely the German grobianism than the delicate festoons of the School of Fontainebleau.19 Greek words, learned borrowings, popular sayings are incrustations within the common French tongue. Rabelais was the “statue of the grotesque” for Flaubert from his early literary essays: Madame Bovary’s author saw in Rabelais’s laughter an unequalled power of demolition and social criticism.20 The word 17 18

19 20

Jean Wirth, Les marges à drôleries des manuscrits gothiques (Geneva: 2008), introduction; Ernst Kris, Le style rustique [1926] (Paris: 2005). Gabriel Du Puy-Herbault, Theotimus, sive de tollendis et expungendis malis libris (Paris: 1549), 95–96; Raphaël Cappellen, “Feueilleter papiers, quotter cayers”: La citation au regard de l’erudito ludere des fictions rabelaisiennes, PhD thesis, University of Tours, 2013, 89sqq. Demonet, “Style rustique et ‘figulines’ littéraires: Rabelais, Palissy, Montaigne,” on-line (halshs-01305913 12/09/2017), 1–13. Gustave Flaubert, Etude sur Rabelais (Rouen: 1839), in Œuvres de jeunesse, eds. C. GothotMersch and G. Sagnes (Paris: 2001), i, 527.

rabelais and language

413

crotesque itself appears twice, rhyming with arabesque in the Third Book (Blazon of the Bollock, ch. xxvi), and describing the emblems of Bacchus’s battle in the Fifth Book: the style of description in the Temple of the Bottle refers to the mannerist grottesca and to the rustic (anti-mannerist) style and the trompel’ œil of the mosaic is so perfect that the characters avoid walking on the fake lizards (ch. xxxvii). Language in Rabelais’s novels is trompe-l’ œil, fictitious, and hyper-realistic at the same time. The scenography of languages gives birth to a carnivalesque demonstration of wordplays and scholarly erudition, using oral and written variants, optical numbers,21 oversized etymologies, sound effects,22 phonetic and graphic extravagances, unpronounceable creations, dramatic dialogues, and court and parliament oratory. Unlike the precise recommendations of Du Bellay’s Defense, there is no assimilation, no digestion, and no innutrition. Tongues and styles rub and scratch each other. Although an excellent Latinist and Hellenist, Rabelais maintains his distance from the “rapetasseurs de vieilles ferrailles latines” (“old scrap iron patchers”), using a word of his soil, rapetasseur. Even his orthography is grotesque, pulled in two opposite directions in his fictitious grammar: sometimes he simplifies (homme is printed home), sometimes he enriches his graphic mood with pedantic arabesques (praesent for present, achapter for acheter). His corrections show how easily one can archaize the written discourse, adding letters loaded with the history of the word, mythic or imaginary. His graphic creations become more and more gigantic, as if the antiquarian orthography was the expression of a gigantic tale, more actual than that of the “grabeleurs de corrections,” his enemies who thought they held an unchangeable truth. Errors participate in French usage: a copy of the 1552 Fourth Book shows nearly fifty corrections of his hand, but Rabelais missed more than eighty others.23 The literary and linguistic grotesque does not preclude the vivid expression of passions: the Rabelaisian novels give great importance to encounter and friendship, desire of revenge, and to their modalities: lamentations, execrations, cries, complaints, and a whole assortment of curses. Language as performance is at stake: exclamations, interjections, onomatopoeias, and insults burst out like bubbles, in Utopian, Greek, Tourangeau, Hebrew, or Occitan.

21 22 23

Michel Butor, Denis Hollier (eds.), Rabelais ou c’ était pour rire (Paris: 1972). François Cornilliat, “On sound effects in Rabelais (part i),”er 39 (2000): 137–167; Cornilliat, “On sound effects in Rabelais (part ii),” er 42 (2003): 7–55. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Y2_2164.

414 5

demonet

Gardening the Jargons

It is difficult to say whether Rabelais was only a good hearer, or an ordinary user of country words and phrases: the swearword marmes, labeled “Tourangeau” in the Brief declaration, is also in Villon’s vocabulary, but others have no written record, and the many ‘occitanisms’ may hardly appear as bookish borrowings. Rabelais renders in his novels the linguistic variety of France as well as of his foreign visitors and his informers during his journeys. It is also difficult to separate what comes from regionalisms and the so-called “jargon des gueux,” the beggars’ jargon, which had the generic designation of “poitevin” since the 15th century, or what is of Languedocian origin.24 Others are from Anjou, another province Rabelais lived in for some time in his youth: tribard et alleboteurs, and the “Good Ragot,” the king of Slang. It would be necessary to add at least twenty terms to the thirty specialized terms that have been identified. Most of them have no gloss in the Brief declaration: dech (“poverty,” more Provençal than Poitevin), duppe, piot, maroufle (“rascal”), belistrandier, claquedents, happelopins, “croquer pie” (“to drink,” ql 1548); fanfreluche belongs to Provençal, as well as farfouiller and farfelu, and the expression “plus d’aubert n’était en fouillouse” (“no more money in the pocket”) to Poitevin. There is no reason why we should believe that Rabelais needed a close knowledge of specific social groups to use their words, neither of the “jobelin” of homosexuals, nor of the practitioners of the ambivalent “gai savoir de la coquille,” because he lived in the regions where these jargons were born. Today still, they are instilling many terms with two or three meanings, which are not always deciphered.25 Further research, and the use of linguistic atlases could help identify some nearly invisible craft slang terms, such as hie that adorns the last poetic composition by Panurge: “Ho, ho, hie. C’ est sapphran d’ Hibernie” (ql lxvii, 701; cw 592). This interjection, also found in Jean de Meung, is a technical noun: a hie is a heavy piece of wood with two handles, with iron at both ends, so that the “batteurs de pavés” (the cobblers) could strike the cobbles

24

25

Pechon de Ruby, La Vie genereuse des Mercelots, Gueuz et Boesmiens, contenans leur façon de vivre, subtilitez & Gergon [1596], ed. D. Delaplace (Paris: 2007); Ollivier Chéreau, Le Jargon ou Langage de l’ Argot reformé [1631], ed. D. Delaplace (Paris: 2008); Michèle Clément, “Le jargon des gueux chez Rabelais,” in La langue de Rabelais et la langue de Montaigne. Actes du colloque de Rome, septembre 2003, eds. J. Céard and F. Giacone, (er) 48 (Geneva: 2008), 155–173. Pierre Guiraud, Le Jargon de Villon ou le gai savoir de la Coquille (Paris: 1968). Guiraud, L’ argot (Paris: 1956).

rabelais and language

415

to push them down. The workers used to call this utensil a hie, a “demoiselle,” because it “made the young lady jump.”26 This double meaning is more seen than heard, even if the origin of the word is Dutch, and the H probably aspirate. The tool itself has a double meaning that joins the various ambiguities (equivocations) of “coignée” (Couillatris’s axe) in the prologue. From the “coignée” to the “hie,” Rabelais is a master of jesting with both codes, oral and written, practicing a twofold rhetoric of graphemes and phonemes. Even if the pronunciation is uncertain, speech acts and sound figures are particularly concentrated in those last lines: Ha, ha, ha? Houay? Que Diable est cecy? Appellez vous cecy foyre, bren, crottes, merde, fiant, dejection, matiere fecale, excrement, repaire, laisse, esmeut, fumee, estront, scybale, ou spyrathe? C’ est (croy je) sapphran d’Hibernie. Ho, ho, hie. C’est sapphran d’Hibernie. Sela, Beuvons. ql lxvii, 701; cw 592

Houay looks like an interjection, whose meaning is ambiguous or uncertain: onomatopoeia? transcription of laughter? sign of pain? The swearword diable inside “Que diable est ceci?” is also a joke about the devilish cat who scratched Panurge’s bottom. The deictic “ceci” (this) and the presentative “c’est” (this is) refer insistently to the stinking enargeia of an obvious symptom of fear. The dialogistic questions to his companions and to the readers, the copia applied with learned variation to his fecal material, borrowed from the hunters when they enforce their cynegetic semiotics, are well adapted to the evocation of the “saffron of Hibernia” (Ireland), a land famous for its “Trou de Saint Patrice,” the anus. “Crois-je” evokes the individual universe of belief and highlights the Sapphic rhyme that gives to this coda the role of proverbial epiphonema.27 The form ouais (“yeah”) can be found in Pathelin and Des Périers, and it is a regional deformation of oui, maybe loaded with irony, and maybe the most accurate translation in French for sela. Like the huckster of the market place and the storyteller of the comedies, Rabelais uses the basic rhetoric of orality, addition, and parataxis, which can wrap up the more elaborate periods of Ciceronian style and offer a variety of registers, from the non-verbal sentence to the very formal discourse.28 The 26 27 28

Pierre Richelet, Dictionnaire françois (Paris: 1680). Paul Zumthor, “L’épiphonème proverbial,” in Rhétorique du proverbe, Revue des sciences humaines 163 (1976): 313–328. Ariane Bayle, Romans à l’ encan: De l’ art du boniment dans la littérature au xvie siècle (Geneva: 2009); Jean Lecointe, “Decorum et art du récit moral dans le Quart livre,” in Un

416

demonet

printed punctuation used in the editions, whether supervised by Rabelais or not, are not faithful enough records as renditions of the oral French of this time: word segmentation and pauses follow the syntax of Latin linguistic groups more than the natural flow of French sentences, as far as we can guess. Despite the reasonable rules published by Etienne Dolet in 1540, a regular punctuation was hardly in use in manuscripts, and in his private letters Rabelais does not seem to pay much attention to the separation of clauses and syntagma, and uses question marks to signal both exclamations and indirect discourse. The rhetoric of orality uses many resources of written pedantry, of figures. It seems neither spontaneous nor popular, but the imitation is quite plausible. This new orality, literally never heard, is one of the most spectacular of linguistic forgeries, giving the reader the impression that he actually heard the words and sounds. The Frozen Words allegory and the enigma of the Pantagruelion ‘paper’ recall the link between sound, writing, and typography. The written word must defrost in order to live again and to endorse the multiple intentions of the author. Close to actual orality, Rabelais is nevertheless conscious of the specific resources of graphic systems and of their independent semiotics, rich with their own history and fiction.

6

Hebrew, a Linguistic Drollery

In his last novels, Rabelais adds many more Hebrew words to his French, especially toponyms (Mecloth), anthroponyms (Ruach), collective names (Ganabins), and even names of animals (Thacor), sela being an exception as an interjectional adverb. While his enemies made a serious joke with Rabelais’s name, glossing with “Rabbi laesus” (the wounded rabbi), Hebrew in the Fourth Book might be an answer to this new cannibalism and a challenge against a true Hebraist and Cabalist.29 Pantagruel and Gargantua feature terms that were very common among the Christians, which did not prevent their frequent misuse of them.30 Before the 1540s, Rabelais’s basic reading and contacts with converts in Montpellier (he mentions the Saporta family) would be sufficient for this superficial

29 30

joyeux quart de sentences, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget, (er) 52 (Geneva: 2012), 167– 186. Antoine Le Roy, Floretum philosophicum (Paris: 1649), 34. Michael Bastiaensen, “L’hébreu chez Rabelais,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 46 (1968): 725–748; Katia Campbell, “Du vrai et faux hébreu chez François Rabelais,” in L’ Hébreu au temps de la Renaissance, ed. I. Zinguer (Leiden: 1992), 197–210.

rabelais and language

417

knowledge that is often faulty, like, for example, the Hebrew date—in Hebrew type—inscribed on the title page of the Almanach of 1535, recently recovered and published.31 Afterwards, Rabelais’s use of Hebrew grew noticeably: he was probably a proficient user of Hebrew grammars and dictionaries, of biblical Latin commentaries on the Hebrew text, such as Pagnino’s and Sebastian Munster’s, through which he could have had access to Talmudic developments.32 Cabbalistic texts written by Christians circulated widely in France and Italy, but Rabelais could have been in contact with the Jewish communities who were still living in Provence and had been recently converted by force in the main towns (Marseille, Aix, Toulon, Hyères), except in regions ruled by Rome, such as Avignon and Carpentras, where they were allowed to practice their own religion, under restrictions. These contacts could have happened earlier: Rabelais mentions the walls of Carpentras in the 1537 edition of Pantagruel, but the name is replaced by Ferrara in 1542. At least one stay in Provence during the Franco-Ottoman campaign of 1543–1544 is probable, coinciding with the mention of the “calloier des Îles Hyères” in the first editions of the Third Book (1546) and the Fourth Book (1548). In Provence and in Italy, Jewish families were under a growing threat; they were ridiculed during carnivals and processions, a tradition that went back to the Middle Ages.33 Like in Spain and Portugal, the newly converted communities were suspected of crypto-Judaism, and Rabelais himself puts in Panurge’s mouth the insults of marranes (“marranos,” starting with Pantagruel), and retaillats (“shorn”), a much more specific term in Provençal (Quart Livre). Moreover, Hebrew texts written for the Jewish Purim were re-published in 1552 in Venice: among them, the Sefer ha-Baqbuq by the famous Provençal philosopher Levi ben Gerson (Gersonides, 14th century), based on a witty spoonerism on the Book of Habaquq, the prophet being a mock-prophetess. The Bottle Bacbuc whose name, “bottle” in Hebrew, pleasantly connected to Bacchus, appears only in the 1552 edition of the Fourth Book and in the Fifth Book.34

31 32 33 34

François Rabelais, Almanach pour l’ an m.d.xxxv, ed. A. Vitale-Brovarone (Paris: 2014). Sante Pagnino, Thesaurus linguae sanctae (Lyon: 1529); Sebastian Munster, Hebraica Biblia (Basel: 1534). Martine Boiteux, “Les Juifs dans le Carnaval de la Rome moderne, xvie–xviiie siècles,” Mélanges de l’ Ecole française de Rome. Moyen-Age, Temps modernes 88.2 (1976): 745–787. Israel Davidson, Parody in Jewish Literature (1907; repr. New York: 1966); Nathalie Zemon Davis, “Rabelais among the Censors,” Representations 32 (1990): 1–32; Esther BenaïmOuaknine, “Pouvoir libérateur du vin et ivresse du texte,” Médiévales 22–23 (1992): 163–172; Demonet, “Le nom de Bacbuc,” rhr 34 (1992): 41–66; Demonet, “Les drôleries du Quart Livre,” in Langue et sens du Quart Livre, ed. F. Giacone (Paris: 2013), 129–150.

418

demonet

Another linguistic subtext is noteworthy: when the narrator tells the tale of the ploughman, his old wife, and the devil, the peasant sows tozelle, the best kind of corn that grows in Southern France; later, he sows raves (turnips or beets), the cheapest vegetable of Central France, including the poor Limousin region, and antithetic of another linguistic root, rav, rab or rabbi, the master, contained in Rabelais’s name (ql xlv–xlvi).35 There is a Hebrew thread in the Fourth Book and often names can be read in French and in Hebrew, such as Farouche, which means “wild” in French or the Hebraic Pheresh “crap,” augmenting the effect of strangeness, exotism, and the grotesque. If Tohu and Bohu could be relatively familiar, Ganabin is as obscure as the Greek Nephelibates and needs the explanations that the Brief declaration gives accurately. Like the learned Hellenists with Greek, Rabelais tinkers with Hebrew, but there is no hint of an actual belief in the Hebrew origin of French: as for other tongues, the result is a manufactured idiom. The last knot of the thread is sela (pronounced sélah), the penultimate word of Rabelais’s works, an equivalent of amen, and much more intriguing. This word is still puzzling for specialists of the Hebrew Bible: it could be a mere sign of the rising voice in the reading of Psalms, an adverb signifying certainement (“indeed,” the translation Rabelais gives), and also the last word of many Jewish headstones, mainly in the Ashkenazi area. Sebastian Munster gives the three meanings but seems to be the only Christian commentator to signal the third one, because he saw such steles in Basel. Even though most of them are now destroyed, there are some vestiges of this funereal epigraphy in the center of France, dating from the 13th century and earlier. Sela also appears three times in the Book of Habaquq, confirming its link with the Jewish grotesque: the “fat Rabbis” were capable of self-mockery in the Talmudic tradition, using the Biblical text for parodic purposes.36 In Renaissance French and in comical literature, the cela refers also to the female genitals, the “comment-a-nom” (“what’s-its-name”) that adds another connotation. This word is a very learned linguistic fiction, and its strategic location at the end of the novel could endorse

35

36

Frank-Rutger Hausmann, “Comment doit-on lire l’ épisode de ‘l’Isle des Papefigues’ (ql, 45–47)?,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 121–129; Demonet, “Raves, Rabbis et Raboulière: La persécution des Papefigues (Rabelais, Quart Livre, chapitre xlv),” in Questions de littérature: Béroul, Rabelais, La Fontaine, Saint-Simon, Maupassant, Lagarce, ed. J.-M. Gouvard (Bordeaux: 2011), 33–59; Franco Giacone, “Relecture de l’ épisode de l’ Isle des Papefigues (Quart Livre, xlv–xlvii),” in Langue et sens du Quart Livre, 411–432. Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: 2009).

rabelais and language

419

a prophetic meaning: the last verses of Habaquq foresee a bloody victory, owing to Yahweh’s blessing. “Sela” escorts usefully the ultimate “buvons,” and both replace the too obvious “trinch” of Book Five. It might be the gesture of raising the glasses, as it was the signal of raising the voice. In the Chaneph episode, raising one’s elbow to drink together is “hausser le temps” (to make better times/ to make the wind blow again, ql lxv), and enables sailing away, at a safe distance from that island of hypocrites.

7

Pope and Poppies

In two famous episodes, Rabelais makes his characters argue and discuss with the language of gestures: in Pantagruel xviii–xx, the academic dispute between Thaumaste and Panurge, and in the Third Book xx, the entertaining conversation between Nazdecabre the Mute and Panurge again. We could add other silent anecdotes where gestures play an important part: in the Third Book when the Roman matron, also mute, signifies her consent by inviting a benevolent male to copulate, and when Sœur Fessue (Sister Bigass) “fait Signe du cul” (“signals with her ass”) to her fellow sisters. When the fool Triboulet gives back the empty bottle after having swallowed its content, it is a simple gesture, but the companions are eager to understand this movement as a sign: its importance is enormous, because it triggers the journey, in order to fetch the Word of the Bottle. In academic disputes, gesture is either a sign language, that of Thaumaste’s, an alphabet that is conventional and still in use in convents, well described in the editions of Beda Venerabilis, or a pleasant interpretation of the rhetoric of actio. Signs are also understood as common gestures of derision, such as Panurge’s, and the comical strength of the episode relies on the contrast between the so-called serious content of the dispute, the monk’s digital alphabet, and the playful or obscene answers by Panurge, a contrast underlined by the pompous interpretations of the audience.37 In the struggle of signs between Panurge and Nazdecabre, every gesture is trivial, and their conversation is on the same level, growing more and more obscene and insulting: the contrast lies in the serious description and the trivial content.

37

Claude La Charité, “La disputation par signes et la philochirosophie,” in Rabelais et la question du sens, 15–36.

420

demonet

In the Fourth Book, however, two allegorical anecdotes convey more discreetly lessons based on a combination of gesture and verbal language: the Italian phrase “ecco lo fico,” combined with a gesture, and the poppies of Emperor Tarquinius.38 The Popefigs’ tragic destiny relies also on a provocative gesture used by three social and religious groups: the Jews (the “fat Rabbis”), the Protestants (Bourgmestres, “Burgmeister”), and the undetermined Southern leaders (Syndics), who might be the leaders of the Vaudois heresy in Provence.39 They have in common the challenge of Roman authority: the gesture of the “fig,” directed against the portrait of the Pope; a gesture of putting the thumb between the other fingers, representing the female genitals; or the shape of a hemorrhoid, which is precisely the medical meaning of the name of the mule Thacor that plays a pivotal role in the anecdotal confrontation between Emperor Barbarossa and the Milanese in 1162, an anecdote that Rabelais recalls here to create a mock etymology of the fig-gesture. Mule in French means also a slipper (pantoufle), the papal shoe that the good Catholics had to kiss as a sign of reverence. Thacor is a rare Hebrew word that one can find in rabbinic commentaries of the Deuteronomy (28, 27) and Samuel (1Samuel 5, 6.9.12), where hemorrhoids represent a condition that is a revenge of Yahweh against the Philistines, thieves of the Arch. The episode is rich with multiple layers of interpretation, especially because Rabelais used a modern source to explain the strange punishment that Frederick Barbarossa meted out against the rebelled inhabitants of Milan in the 12th century, a punishment reiterated against the Papefigues. Sebastian Munster, in his Cosmographia (the 1544 and 1550 editions), provided the best account of this unbelievable tale, with the scene of the extraction of the fig out of the genitals of the mule, the very animal the Milanese had used to mock the Empress Beatrix, expelled out of the town riding backwards: Munster not only used two previous chronicles (by Kranz, and perhaps Paradin), but he added a more explicit description of the fact, with an engraving of the riding empress and a poor Milanese at the mule’s bottom. He adds an end to the episode: the convict had to show the fig once extracted, saying ecco lo fico, “here is the fig,” and Munster explains why in Italy the gesture of putting out the thumb to somebody is henceforth an insult.40 38

39 40

Daniel Ménager, “Les pavots de Tarquin: Énigme et devinette dans les chapitres lxiii et lxiv du Quart Livre,” in L’ Énigmatique à la Renaissance: Formes, significations, esthétiques, ed. D. Martin (Paris: 2008), 65–77. Raymond Lebègue, “Rabelaisiana: Notes et documents,” bhr 10 (1948): 159–168. Sebastian Munster, Cosmographia (Basel: 1544), ii, 127r; Albrecht Krantz, Saxonia (Cologne: 1520), vi, xxxvi, 78. Guillaume Paradin, De statu Burgundiae (Lyon: 1542), 56.

rabelais and language

421

Interestingly enough, the French expression “faire la figue,” or “far la fica” in Occitan, with the mitigated meaning of “taunting,” was common in Southern France (Montaigne uses the phrase without any obscene connotation), since the troubadours spread the story as soon as the Milanese rebellion was known. The fool Robert le Diable “fait la figue au pape” (makes the sign of the fig to the pope), then in Avignon, in a mystery play that Rabelais mentions.41 The gesture is also often depicted in paintings of the Passion scene of irrisio Christi, in Germany and in Italy since the 13th century, when the Jews scorn Jesus with insults. But in Rabelais’s novel, the gesture is directed against the image of the pope, who pretends to be “God on earth.” It is one of Panurge’s gestures toward Thaumaste, and, more recognizably, from Nazdecabre (“Goatnose,” an Occitan name) towards Panurge. Going back to e original fig-thumb, Rabelais ‘unfreezes’ the Italian (and Occitan) phrase, giving a new life to the obscene demonstration. He adds a detail of his own: the rebels who accepted the humiliating punishment held out the fig to the boye (a Provençal term for bourreau, executioner), while uttering the saying, while doing so, they reiterated the insult “made the fig” to their enemies and put the curse of a vindictive disease on the pope-emperor. It recalls the Gascon (Occitan) scourge with which Alcofribas threatens the malevolent reader at the end of the first prologue: “que la caquesangue vous viengne” (P prol., 215; cw 135), “que le maulubec vous trousque!” (Pantagruel, prol.; Gargantua, prol.). Thus, Rabelais stages the ultimate bravado of the rebels, who reverse the punishment into a reckless provocation. He invites the reader to match the Milanese and the Popefigs, whose name already contains “pope” and “fig,” this term being also close to “fugue,” fleeing the pope.42 If there is a political context the words can highlight, two tracks could be followed in order to understand the obscure episode of the Popefigs: not only the massacre of the Vaudois in Provence (1545), at the request of the Cardinal of Tournon, but also the renewal of the old antagonism against the Jews, in Rome and in Provence.43 Similar arguments invite drawing a similitude between their situation in France in the 14th century and the hatred and humiliations they had to endure again from the 1540s on, illustrated by the public burning of the Talmud in Rome in 1553. Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, bishop of Carpentras,

41 42 43

Miracle de Nostre-Dame, de Robert le Diable, ed. Société des Antiquaires de Normandie (Rouen: 1836), 119. Demonet, “Langue et culture judéo-provençales chez Rabelais: Pourim et shuadit,” online, Academia.edu (12/12/2017), 1–18. Marc Venard, Réforme protestante, réforme catholique dans la province d’Avignon au xvie siècle (Paris: 1993), 71 sqq.

422

demonet

did nothing to prevent the massacre and complained about the Jews as well as about the Christian heretics.44 The wordplays in Italian, French, Occitan dialects, and Hebrew lump together several groups of persecuted people during these years (1540–1550): ‘Evangelicals’ like Rabelais, Vaudois and Lutherans, Jews and Retaillats. A last tale illustrates the efficiency of silent language: offshore Chaneph, the Island of the Hypocrites, when the ship Thalamege does not call because the wind fails, Pantagruel waits for a sign from God, and tells the story of the “pavots de Tarquin,” Tarquinius’s poppies (ql lxiii). The tale is interrupted by the ringing of the bell, which Friar John immediately understands as the signal of rushing into the kitchen, instead of going to church, as the examples in the manuals of dialectic used to teach. Rabelais modifies the legendary anecdote that seems to have no connection with the immobility of the ship. Eusthenes, one of Pantagruel’s companions, seeks a solution to a problem, how to get rid of snakes and venomous beasts when one is hungry. “Not by long circumlocutions and wordy speeches,” Pantagruel replies, and answers nonetheless with the parable of Tarquinius’s poppies: without a word, the action of cutting off the heads of the tallest poppies of his garden meant to his son that the leaders of the Gabins had to be eliminated. Although the modern interpretation gave birth to the ‘tall poppy syndrome,’ which requires that leaders and prominent people will be executed by the tyrant because of the jealousy they provoke, the Rabelaisian lesson seems to be the opposite: the rebels are the inhabitants of Chaneph, and the next island is that of the Ganabins, whose name is close to the Roman Gabins. Thus, the leaders must be executed. But who are they? Unlike the Popefigs, who have lost everything, save their honor, in their fight against the emperor, the Hypocrites would be the modern rebels who, obeying the pope, disobey their natural monarch, the king of France. It would be better to chop their heads off, but nothing such is said: Rabelais remains silent, and the reader must imagine the key of the silent parable. The royal gesture is equivocal and opens up interpretations of political issues.

44

Marc Venard, “Jacques Sadolet, évêque de Carpentras, et les Vaudois,” Bolletino della Società di Studi Valdesi 143 (June1978): 37–49.

rabelais and language

8

423

Sailing Words

In the Fourth Book again, and not only in the Tempest episode, Rabelais displays a remarkable and precise knowledge of nautical vocabulary, ancient and modern, without giving any explanation in the Brief declaration, except for the Greek celoces and celeusme, meaning, respectively, “vessels light upon the sea” and “song to exhort the sailors to give them courage” (cw 596, 599; oc 706, 708). Whereas in the Third Book and in the 1548 Fourth Book the main origin of this vocabulary is in the Mediterranean and the Levant, in the last novel there is a shift towards the west and the Atlantic, the “Ponant” (west). This type of knowledge does not seem to be book-based, but neither does it appear secondhand. The technical aspects combine a threefold sailing experience: Atlantic, Mediterranean, and from the Loire basin: Panurge gives the command to “virer la peaultre” (“turn the wishbone”), a Ligerian expression.45 Only five or six terms belong to Brittany or Normandy or are borrowed from the sailor language of the northern countries: e.g., grain (sea squall), portehaubans (chain-wale), orque (orca and transport ship). The group chippe, voluntaire, flouin is added in 1552; grizelles, cosses, orgeau, aigueuillot, caveche, uretacque, bressin, heaume, peaultre, coursoir, boulingues, bonnette, galerne, malettes come from the Loire and the western coasts, but the Ponant vocabulary could also be in use among the river sailors. Along with the literary words borrowed from ancient texts, the Fourth Book shows mainly terms from Italy, Languedoc, and Provence, the terms being more or less the same. The Mediterranean experience would be supported by the term calloier, the title that Rabelais gives himself for the first Third Book and the Fourth Book: a Greek name for a monk in the Aegean Sea, which refers also to some Provençal penitents.46 Kalos hieros (“good saint”) enables an allusio, a pun about the Hyères Islands, where a physician could find the lavandula stoechas (a particular lavender), an interesting psychotrope Rabelais mentions along with the Pantagruelion. The danger of a nautical war, before another invasion of Provence by Charles v, was real and alarming between 1543 et 1545, and 45

46

Augustin Jal, Glossaire nautique: répertoire polyglotte de termes de marine anciens et modernes (Paris: 1848). Jal, “Sur les navigations de Pantagruel,” in Archéologie navale, vol. ii, Mémoire 9 (Paris: 1840), 426–528 (496 sqq.); Léon Denoix, “Les connaissances nautiques de Rabelais,” in François Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort, 1553–1953 (Geneva: 1953), 171–180; Robert Marichal, “Le nom des vents chez Rabelais,” er 1 (1956): 1–28; Demonet, “Rabelais, marin d’ eau douce? (Quart Livre),” in Un joyeux quart de sentences, 69–88. Louis Honoré, “À propos de Rabelais, ‘calloier des isles Hières’,” Var historique et géographique (1931): 267–268.

424

demonet

Guillaume Du Bellay’s former companions had to set up the flotilla of the king’s galleys in Marseilles, before the arrival of the Ottoman ships in Marseilles, Toulon, and Hyères. Between the two editions, Rabelais blurs the geographic references, expanding them from a specific southern reality to embrace all the territories that would fit the royal ambitions, from Labrador to Alexandria, and thus making the journey more imaginary and literary. One third of the 150 nautical words noticed by Sainéan belonged already to the French tongue (matelot, bateau, etc.), but the others are very specific, and sometimes still not identified ( flouin, volantaire).47 Rabelais pushed as far as possible the enrichment of the vernacular with the addition of craftsmen vocabulary: the Defense et illustration de la langue française (1549) was published precisely between the two versions of the Fourth Book, and Rabelais followed Du Bellay closely despite the grammarian’s recommendation to avoid new terms such as “rochers en la mer” (“rocks at sea,” Pantagruel): indeed, they were not neologisms. The word “chiourme” (oarsmen or ship crew), with five examples in the Fourth Book, is specific of the galley vocabulary: its origin is Greek, afterwards passing into Italian, and appearing in the Amadis de Gaule series in 1544. Only this usage is new. A special feature of the nautical lexicon overcomes the technicality: its performativity. Sailors were famous for their penchant for blasphemy in competition with card and dice players (properties of devils, as the Fifth Book describes them).48 During the maneuvers, Friar John invokes thousands of devils, expressions Panurge takes very seriously, when he thinks that devils are the cause of the tempest. But the narrator provides another source for the fury of the elements: the orque, the transport ship where several religious orders were placed in chapter 18, is also the homonym of the orca, the sea monster of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and a model for the naughty physeter (whale) that Pantagruel would soon defeat as a new Perseus. The devils are the monks, Jacobins, Jesuits, Capuchins, Hermits, Franciscans, etc., who sail to the Council of Chesil, a probable pseudonym for the Council of Trent, “pour grabeler les articles de la foy contre les nouveaulx hæreticques” (ql xviii, 581; “to scrutinize and garble the articles of faith against the new heretics,” cw 477). The targets are the devils enjupponnés (“skirted”), clearly monks and friars.

47 48

Lazare Sainéan, La langue de Rabelais (Paris: 1922–1923), i, 196sqq. Alain Cabantous, Histoire du blasphème en Occident: Fin xvie–milieu xixe siècle (Paris: 1998).

rabelais and language

9

425

Firing Swearwords

The Church began to feel very sensitive about the proliferation of swearing and invoked the second commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” (King James Bible), reactivated by one of the ordinances of Villers-Cotterêts, better known for the promotion of French, instead of Latin, in the administration (1539). This verbal censorship joins the new intolerance against obscene and mocking images (paintings, drawings, sculptures), and affects the very possibility of political polemics, while leaving open the field to literary satire and Menippean satura (medley).49 The belief in the quasi-magic character of the certain designations, be they aimed at saints or demons, is an exception within the ordinary descriptions of language as institution. Their sacred nature gives them a power nearly no one dares to challenge. Jurer (to swear) remains a speech act, it does what it says, and is supposed to be effective, like the verb promettre (to promise).50 The transfer of sacredness from the Church institutions to the monarchy implies that swearing becomes a civil crime, like sorcery.51 Royal edicts had to be enforced: impunity was no longer tolerated after 1546, a date that coincides with the Third Book and the first documented condemnation of Rabelais’s novels. However, swearwords, oaths, and insults were scattered in farces, in mystery plays, where the language of demons was a quaint repertoire of forbidden words, expressions, and jargons, as well as in the vigorous sermons of Franciscans preachers in early-modern France (Michel Menot, Olivier Maillart) using the Franciscan “salt.” It was a specialty that Jean Ménard, an unfrocked friar from Tours and early Calvinist, used against his previous order when he published his Règle des Cordeliers in Geneva (1540): Rabelais’s puns for the Island of Alliances were closely inspired by the apostate.52 49 50

51

52

Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007). Jacqueline Hoareau-Dodineau, Dieu et le Roi: La répression du blasphème et de l’injure au roi à la fin du Moyen Âge (Limoges: 2002); Laurence Rosier, Petit traité de l’insulte (Loverval: 2006); Nicole Gonthier, “Sanglant Coupaul!” “Orde Ribaude!”: Les injures au Moyen Âge (Rennes: 2007). Jean Delumeau, Le péché et la peur: La culpabilisation en Occident xiiie–xviiie siècles (Paris: 1983); Corinne Leveleux, La parole interdite: Le blasphème dans la France médiévale, xiiie–xvie siècles, du péché au crime (Paris: 2001). Jean Ménard, Declaration de la reigle et estat des Cordeliers (Geneva: [1540] 1542); Émile V. Telle, “L’île des Alliances (Quart Livre, chap. ix) ou l’anti-Thélème,” bhr 12 (1952): 159– 175; Demonet, “Utopies et dystopies chez Rabelais, de Pantagruel au Quart Livre,” in Utopie, consensus et libre arbitre (xive–xviie siècles): Fais ce que voudras (Revista Morus) 8 (2013): 14–27.

426

demonet

Rabelais is very close to blasphemy when he allows his characters to swear, provided they use the legal formula da jurandi that he takes for granted (P iii, 226; cw 144) or the sophistic delegation of swearing, which Panurge transfers to his squire: Paige mon mignon, tien icy mon bonnet, je te le donne, saulve les lunettes, et va en la basse court jurer une petite demi heure pour moy. Je jureray pour toy quand tu vouldras. tl xxxvi, 465; cw 366

Quite relevantly, Friar John swears “par la sacre botte de saint Benoit” (“by the holy barrel of saint Benedict”) (ql xvi). Like Pathelin in his Farce, Rabelais enjoys insults in dialects and foreign languages, trying to justify them by the prepon, the rhetoric of decorum and adaptation; what is said of swearing could be said of fiction itself: “to entertain, without offending God.” In this domain, Rabelais’s creativity is truly impressive: before he self-censored the text, his Parisians, attacked by Gargantua’s urinal flood, asked the help of many saints, real or invented (Saint Goguelu, Saint Quenet, and others with more obscene names), and swearwords in Italian, Gascon, Poitevin, German that are later replaced by the innocuous “Par saincte mamye” (G xvii). The royal oath, “foy de gentilhomme,” disappears as soon as 1537, despite its use in a quotation that should have protected the author. The linguistic and performative registers of the characters make them belong to a world of fiction very close to the real world, with the same laws and dangers. Verisimilitude is a risk for the author, and Rabelais retains the parrhesia of the first editions to practice a more enigmatic and allegorical style later. Nevertheless, his enemies identified this kind of blasphemous freedom quite accurately in his novels.

10

Carnival and Prosecution

Another case of linguistic withdrawal is a diatribe we can read in the Fifth Book, but not in the later Quart Livre, as the felon town of Cainon is removed in the last novel. This retraction is focused on a word from the Tourangeau dialect, the raboulière, the name given in the Center of France to the holes of the raboliots (“lapins de Garenne,” wild rabbits). The term has the same root as the Wallon “rabbit” (unknown origin) but also suggests the easy, false connection with the rabbis. In the Fifth Book the Chats-Fourrés are cursed, because their job is so harmful that they would deserve to “tous vifs là-dedans leur raboulière félon-

rabelais and language

427

nement brûler” (“naughtily burnt alive in their rabbit holes”). They become the Shysteroos who, in the Fourth Book, are not burnt, only beaten out heartily. Above all, the burning of the Jewish convicts is a historical event that happened in Chinon in 1321, when the town’s prominent Jews (about one hundred and sixty), and especially the rabbis, were thrown in a pit, and burned with a stake set on fire under them, as the inhabitants used to do with rabbits. This linguistic play between French, Provençal, and Hebrew impacts the entire interpretation of the Ringing Island chapters, although Rabelais removed the most obvious attacks against political and religious targets. The island has many features of Avignon, the former papal residence in the 14th century, which was called altera Roma: several Christian Hebraists learnt Hebrew with the local rabbis, and the pronunciation was peculiar, influenced by the Provençal: the plural of nouns in -in instead of -im, the initial ‘s’ pronounced [s] instead of [sh]. Rabelais gives such a plural, with a French morphological mark to his Ennasins and Ganabins, and in the Fifth Book to his Chachanins, Neemanins, Rozuins, etc. In the 19th century, linguists named this hybrid dialect the shuadit, in fact Judeo-Provençal, with Hebrew words the spelling of which may show these features: the earliest testimony that is left is the Sermoun dei Jussiou (The Jew’s Sermon), dated 1517 according to the manuscripts held in Carpentras and Avignon (copies of the 17th and 18th centuries), and attributed to Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, a bona fide Erasmian, up to his anti-Judaism.53 We can notice some traces of this oral usage in the Fourth and Fifth Books: beyond endings in -in, see the mention of the Biblical episode of the Shibboleths/Sibboleths, which matches the modern scholarly quarrel of entelechia/endelechia. In the Bible, those who did not pronounce correctly were killed, language being a formidable criterion to eliminate a presumed enemy.54 In Northern Italy, the Jews who inserted their own Hebraic dialect in Italian were mocked as well.55 The difficulty of transcribing shalom in the last edition

53

54

55

George Jochnowitz, “Shuadit: La langue juive de Provence,” Archives juives 14 (1978): 63– 67; Armand Lunel, “Quelques aspects du parler judéo-comtadin,” L’arche 94 (November 1964): 43–45; Marie-Claire Viguier, “Le judéo-occitan existe: essai sur la ‘lenga juzieva’,” in Juifs et sources juives en Occitanie (Valeriès: 1988), 193–209; Marie-Claire Viguier, “Le ‘Sermon des Juifs’ à Carpentras: Carnaval ou Pourim?,” Annales du Midi 187, t. 101 (1989): 235– 259; Peter Nahon, Les parlers français des Israélites du Midi, Ph.D. thesis (Paris-Sorbonne, 2020). Robert Moulinas, Les Juifs du Pape en France: Les communautés d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaisssin (Paris: 1981), 194–195. Danièle Iancu, Les Juifs en Provence: 1475–1501, de l’insertion à l’ expulsion (Marseille: 1981). Roberto Bonfil, Rabbini e comunità ebraiche nell’italia del Rinascimento (Naples: 2012).

428

demonet

of Pantagruel (scalon, pronounced ‘s’ with initial sc like scavoir), might be a sign of this hesitation, and the first salutation of the Sermoun is “Salon alaren.” This linguistic context, specific of Provence, would attest to a second phase in Rabelais’s life, when he was more closely in contact with Hebrew communities, maybe the same that helped him read the Sefer Ha-Baqbuq, likewise of Provençal origin. If he was aware of the connection between some rabbis from Chinon, who had fled from France to Provence two centuries earlier, the memory of which was preserved in their religious writings, the striking emergence of Hebrew in the Fourth Book and the Fifth Book might be justified. The resumption of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in his time—Erasmus and Sadoleto included—encouraged by Louis xii, the popes, and the local population who saw an opportunity of cancelling their debts, led Rabelais to grant this biblical and rabbinic Hebrew a prominent place, nearly as important as Greek, filling his French tongue with a strong political and religious significance, in a tone of joyful revenge. In itself, Hebrew is a sign of a familiar otherness through the freedom of fiction, used to question everyone’s choices in his private and social life. The ‘economic’ episodes reveal the author’s awareness of the relativity and the trouble of language, money, and value: Panurge earning “pardons” (Pantagruel), Panurge’s praise of debts (Third Book), Panurge bargaining for sheep (Fourth Book).56 Rabelais imagined and feared that his “thesor soit charbons” (Third Book), since the devilish censors can transform words into worthless material, but his protectors have the power of transforming an easy-burning Pantagruelion into a novel made of “asbestos” language that will never catch fire. 56

Terence Cave, “La comédie rabelaisienne de l’ argent,” in Préhistoires ii: Langues étrangères et troubles économiques au xvie siècle (Geneva: 2001), 105sqq.

chapter 17

Missing Women: On the Riddle of Gender Relations in Rabelais’s Fiction François Cornilliat

Now that peace has returned to the world, Gargantua wants to reward the valorous Frère Jean by making him abbot of Seuillé (or another monastery). The monk refuses: how could he govern others when he cannot govern himself? All he asks is permission to found (not run) an abbey of his own design. The giant approves and offers his “property of Thélème”; Frère Jean requests that the convent be instituted “in the opposite way from all the others.”1 Gargantua’s first idea is that Thélème will have no ramparts, since all abbeys have those. Frère Jean agrees, punning on the “murmur” that spreads behind “murs” (walls), sowing “mutual conspiracy.” Then comes a clause that is so specific as to seem out of place, even though it reveals what it is that ramparts keep out and conspiracy feeds on: because “some” (male) monastic communities clean up any ground a woman has walked on, the same will be done at Thélème whenever a monk or a nun visits. The third counter-rule is more general: no artificial measure of time—only one’s own internal sense—will run the abbey’s schedule; but the next item again shifts back from basic principles to bizarre habits: since today’s convents tend to admit only deformed, repulsive, or insane women as well as sickly, stupid, or worthless men, Thélème will only take in women and men that are “fair, well-formed and well-natured.”2 Extended from women to men, beauty now unites the two genders, whose respective flaws reflected distinct assumptions.3 The target is the separation of sexes that is de rigueur in monastic orders; yet this rule is not mentioned as such: the focus is on its consequences (absurd exorcisms, perverse admissions), which ‘grounds’

1 G 52, 116. On the key role of Frère Jean, see André Tournon, “L’abbé de Thélème,” Saggi e ricerche di letteratura Francese 26 (1987): 201–220. 2 G 52, 117. On beauty and harmony in Thélème, see Guy Demerson, L’esthétique de Rabelais (Paris: 1996), 106–112. 3 As noted by Diane Desrosiers-Bonin, Rabelais et l’ humanisme civil, (er) 27 (Geneva: 1992), 135; and Marian Rothstein, “Androgyne, Agape, and the Abbey of Thélème,”French Forum 26.1 (2001): 1–19 (4).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_019

430

cornilliat

the counter-rule, makes it appear justified instead of arbitrary or merely formal. We are also reminded that men strive to enter female convents by stealth: Thélème, therefore, will not only admit both sexes, but stipulate that “never would women be there unless men were there also, nor men there unless women were there too.”4 Set against the evil that separation has wrought, this formula does not merely allow cohabitation: it imposes it and makes it ubiquitous. Frère Jean cannot resist making another pun (he will not be heard again until the very last chapter): a woman who is neither fair nor good, “à quoy vault toille?” (instead of the homophonic “t-elle”: “what is cloth good for?” / “what is she good for?”). Gargantua’s answer is “to put into a convent”; “and to make shirts?” adds the monk.5 The punchline leavens an increasingly serious description; it is the parting shot of a comic register that is the monk’s signature style.6 For example, when Grandgousier admonished a group of pilgrims to return to their families instead of wasting time on idle journeys,7 Frère Jean brought the point home more colorfully: the friars of Saint-Genou, he swore, are sleeping with the travelers’ wives, no matter how ugly they might be. To this kind of humor, the unruly sexuality assumed in both women and monks is a reliable accessory to sarcasm directed at other targets: in this case, the ‘superstitious’ practice of pilgrimage. The giant’s role is to speak directly, with stern compassion for the pilgrims and sharp anger aimed at the ‘false prophets’ who misled them. Frère Jean’s role is to concur indirectly: by mocking another, more conventional set of perpetrators, he laughs about the whole subject and prevents it from being taken too seriously. The pun on “toille,” likewise, works alongside Gargantua’s buttressing of the Thélème concept; but women and their conduct are now much closer to the heart of the matter. Females who are neither fair nor good will take their shirt-making elsewhere—to a nunnery, as per the very practice that our heroes are in fact railing against. This may strike modern readers as the imposition of a beauty canon at the expense of those who do not conform; Thélème’s logic, while proudly aristo-

4 cw, 117. G 52, 138: “[…] jà ne seroient là les femmes au cas que n’y feussent les hommes, ny les hommes en cas que n’ y feussent les femmes”; the alternative is an empty space. Cf. Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, iii, xiv, on the fact that male and female, by nature, cannot exist without each other. 5 G 52. In More’s Utopia, where everyone works, women make fabric. Mireille Huchon (ed.), Gargantua (Paris: 2007), 454, n. 12. 6 See Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, “Hors toute intimidation”: Panurge ou la parole singulière, (er) 41 (Geneva: 2003), 332. 7 G 45.

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

431

cratic,8 works the other way around, against an exclusion rule that corrupts inner identities and mutual perceptions. Even Frère Jean, at this stage, is not making fun of the “ladies of high degree” mentioned by the “Inscription” that adorns the abbey’s gate9—women deemed beautiful and virtuous enough to enter the new space along with the noble knights who will serve as their companions. Chapter 52’s first sketch of the project ends with two more inversions of monastic principles: instead of final vows, the right to leave; instead of chastity, poverty, and obedience, Thélème favors marriage, wealth, and the kind of liberty that chapter 57 will summarize under the abbey’s one and only “rule”,10 “Fay ce que vouldras,” do what you will. The contrary of poverty is self-evident; the contrary of obedience less so, in that it takes the idea of freedom to an honorable extreme, thanks to a thelema (“will” in biblical Greek) that is good precisely in that it has been liberated from abusive control.11 The contrary of chastity is even more specific: implying sexual activity together with social and moral values, it is not debauchery (prompted by abstinence) but the institution of marriage, which the abbey strengthens by allowing a man and a woman to develop “amytié” for one another.12 The Thélémites can be married on the premises; they can also leave in order to get married,13 when a man, upon departing at his parents’ request or for any reason, takes along the

8 9

10 11

12

13

On the abbey’s class structure and the status of its non-noble population, see Carla Freccero, Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structures in Rabelais (Ithaca: 1991), 122–124. G 54, 122. Also welcome are those who preach the Gospel and need protection from persecution (Thélème is first defined by the long list of those—hypocrites, bigots, etc.—who are denied entrance). The principles listed in ch. 52 are not “rules,” but prerequisites. See Per Nykrog, “Thélème, Panurge et la Dive Bouteille,” rhlf 65.3 (1965): 385–397; Ullrich Langer, “Liberté chrétienne et liberté stoïcienne: L’abbaye de Thélème,” in Stoïcisme et christianisme à la Renaissance, ed. A. Tarrête (Cahiers V.L. Saulnier) 18 (Paris: 2006), 59– 70. For Michael Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca: 1979), 188–189, and Edwin Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 34 (Geneva: 1997), 173–176, this will to do as we please is not the ‘free will’ that competes or cooperates with grace in matters of salvation; thelema deals with human issues (such as marriage: cf. St. Paul, iCor 7:36–38) that are ‘indifferent’ to God. See Gilles Polizzi, “Thélème ou l’ éloge du don: Le texte rabelaisien à la lumière de l’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,”rhr 25 (1987): 39–59, on a counter-model: in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia, the hero guided by “Thelemia” is destined to choose the door of Love (as opposed to Glory of God and World Glory). One text narrates a specific and enslaving individual choice; the other describes a syncretic and collective freedom. As stated in ch. 52 and 57 respectively. As Desrosiers-Bonin notes in Rabelais et l’humanisme civil, 137, there is no contradiction.

432

cornilliat

woman who made him her “devoted suitor”—in a shift from the abbey’s women-centered microcosm to a larger world where men (and parents) retain the upper hand.14 Either way, what is promised to them is mutual love till the end of their days. Thus, by upending monastic celibacy, Thélème also reforms the old ‘courtois’ ideal. Instead of a hero submitting to his lady’s wishes and racking up exploits to prove himself worthy of her, we have men who get coiffed and perfumed before spending the day in the company of women:15 knights no longer wander out, and if their splendid clothes have to match the ladies’ own choice of dress, it is out of “sympathy,” not submission. Some activities remain segregated: men bear arms and do sports; women perform needle-work and “every honorable and free womanly act.”16 Yet both relish reading, writing, singing, and speaking five or six languages;17 also hunting, especially “volerie,” which allows men and women to ride together while carrying different birds of prey. Above all, the paradoxical result of the “fay ce que vouldras” principle (all end up doing the same thing) is gender-neutral (compliance occurs whether “quelqu’un ou quelcune” suggests an activity); so is “honneur,” the inner stimulus that spurs this consensual emulation by inciting virtue and deterring vice.18 Thus man and woman live in harmony by dint of what they have in common,19

14

15 16 17 18

19

See Rothstein, “Androgyne,” 15; on the role of parents the Third Book (ch. 48) will insist far more heavily. On reciprocity and its limits in Humanist marriage doctrine, see e.g. Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: 1990), ch. 1, 4; Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore, Les femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance (Geneva: 1990), esp. 52–61; Madeleine Lazard, Les avenues de Féminye. Les femmes et la Renaissance (Paris: 2001), ch. 3, 4; Reinier Leushuis, Le mariage et l’‘amitié courtoise’ dans le dialogue et le récit bref de la Renaissance (Florence: 2003), ch. 1; Marie-Claude Malenfant, Argumentaires de l’ une et l’ autre espèce de femme: Le statut de l’ exemplum dans les discours littéraires sur la femme (1500–1550) (Québec: 2003); Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: 2006), ch. 3. Cf. Castiglione’s Courtier, iii, iii: no court can be splendid without women; see Leushuis, Le mariage et l’ ‘amitié courtoise’, ch. 2. G 57, 127. Cf. Gargantua’s letter (P 8), which notes that even “women and girls” are now aspiring to the “manna of good learning.” Thélème completes the program. See Rothstein, “Androgyne,” 3–4; cf. Desrosiers-Bonin, “Rabelais et la nature féminine,” in Actes des conférences du Cycle “Rabelais et la nature” organisé durant l’année 1994, ed. F. Metivier, (er) 31 (Geneva: 1996), 31–47, pp. 44–45. On synderesis, see Screech, Rabelais, 191. In his De nobilitate and praecellentia foeminei sexus (1509), Agrippa von Nettesheim had repeated after many others that man and woman, created in the image of God, have identical souls. See Marc Angenot, Les champions des femmes: Examen du discours sur la supériorité des femmes, 1400–1800 (Montréal: 1977), 30; on the importance of this idea for Thélème, see Rothstein, “Androgyne,” 11–12.

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

433

and a place where human will has been freed by “Christian liberty” also liberates human love. Such is the concept that brings Gargantua to a close,20 suggesting its importance to the narrative’s sense of its own end. Yet the Thélème chapters are separated from the main line of the tale: what is described is not a hero’s supreme reward,21 but the habitual conduct of an anonymous group.22 The story thus ‘closed,’ on the other hand, is one from which women are mostly absent, and where they mostly appear, it seems, so as to be mocked or used in mocking others. While Gargantua may be more restrained than Pantagruel in this respect, it remains that no women play a durable role in either book,23 and that none of the male principals, not even the two giants whose moral growth appears to be their main theme, are asked by the story to illustrate Thélème’s ideal. This is not an ideological discrepancy, even when it appears to be one: for example, Pantagruel’s decision, at the end of the Third Book, to let his father choose a wife for him while he is away can in fact be reconciled with a free thelema;24 but

20 21 22 23

24

Or would, were it not for the final enigma, which elicits two different interpretations. Both are left standing. From which Thélème is twice detached: Gargantua does not get married (yet); Frère Jean will never marry. See Tournon, “En sens agile”: Les acrobaties de l’ esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: 1995), 158–161. See Françoise Charpentier’s verdict, “Un Royaume qui perdure sans femmes,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 195– 209, and discussion by Desrosiers-Bonin, “Rabelais et la nature féminine”; Tournon, “Un silence signé Rabelais,” Cahiers Textuel 15 (1996): 77–87; Florence M. Weinberg, Rabelais et les leçons du rire: Paraboles évangéliques et néoplatoniciennes (Orléans: 2000); Rothstein, “Androgyne,” Jean Bazola, “La femme dans la vie et l’œuvre de Rabelais,” Bulletin de l’ Association des Amis de Rabelais et de La Devinière 6.6 (2007): 561–572; 6.7 (2008): 648–657; Pollie E. Bromilow, “Inside Out: Female Bodies in Rabelais,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 44 (2008): 27–39; Marie-Luce Demonet, “Pantagrueline Humanism and Rabelaisian Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais, ed. J. O’Brien (Cambridge, Eng.: 2011), 73–92, and Barbara C. Bowen, “Women in Rabelais’s Chroniques,” Cornucopia: Le Verger i (2012), at: cornucopia16.com, as well as Freccero’s theoretical take “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the ‘Haulte dame de Paris’ (Pantagruel, 14),” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15 (1985): 57–67; Father Figures; “Queer Rabelais?” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais, eds. T.W. Reeser and F. Gray (New York: 2011), 182–191. Screech notes the gap between Thélème’s depiction of women and “what is suggested by any other parts of [Rabelais’s] very masculine books.” Rabelais, 190. Third Book, ch. 48, 398–401; see Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, 181. On the social parameters of this decision, see e.g. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage. Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy (London: 1958); Jordan, Renaissance Feminism; Freccero, Father Figures; Cathleen M. Bauschatz, “Rabelais and Marguerite De Navarre on Sixteenth-Century Views of Clandestine Marriage,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 34.2 (2003): 395–408.

434

cornilliat

it confirms that the marriage of the giant (who never gave it a thought) is not a narrative object. A few pages later, the praise of Pantagruelion has the gods announce that Pantagruel is destined to marry and procreate: they fear that his children will discover another wondrous herb, which will enable them to visit the Heavens and “take our goddesses as wives.”25 Now that would make a story worthy of Ariosto—or Lucian. Yet it is not meant to be told: the point of this hyperbolic aside is ambiguous praise,26 not the kind of ‘teleological’ tale that signifies the value of a goal by relating what it takes to reach it. No narrative will tackle the giant’s marriage, as though to do so would pervert it; by contrast, a story is being made out of Panurge’s inability to reach such a goal. Unlike, therefore, those novels or epics whose heroes, in an effort to reconcile “armes et amours”27 or separate passion from mission,28 must interact with women, this particular “geste” seems determined to keep its cast of male characters insulated from any lasting encounter with the other sex.29 On the

25 26

27

28

29

Third Book, ch. 51, 409. Like the description of Thélème, the eulogy of Pantagruelion is a surprising addition to the story, which brings it to a (temporary) stop rather than to an end; but the herb is more ambivalent than the abbey. The point of “romans de chevalerie,” problematized by hybrid creations like Orlando furioso, is further subverted by Rabelais. See e.g. Elizabeth A. Chesney, The Countervoyage of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading of Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Durham: 1982); Béatrice Périgot, “Rabelais et le modèle épique de l’Arioste,” in L’épopée et ses modèles de la Renaissance aux Lumières, eds. F. Greiner and J.-C. Ternaux (Paris: 2002): 89–102; Mawy Bouchard, Avant le roman: L’ allégorie et l’ émergence de la narration française au 16e siècle (Amsterdam-New York: 2006); Pascale Mounier, Le roman humaniste: Un genre novateur français. 1532–1564 (Paris: 2007). As Aeneas does (see below). This can also be true of outrageous mock-epics like Folengo’s Baldus, in which women play a vital (if mostly negative) role. On the epic and its subversion in Rabelais, see among many others Duval’s three Designs; Demerson, Humanisme et Facétie: Quinze études sur Rabelais (Orléans: 1994), 17–33; Hope Glidden, “L’Epopée décalée de Rabelais,” in Le plaisir de l’ épopée, ed. G. Mathieu-Castellani (Saint-Denis: 2000), 313–330; Périgot, “Rabelais et le modèle épique de l’Arioste.” For a framing and critique of this issue in terms of reception and feminist theory, see Wayne Booth, “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 9.1 (1982): 45–76; Elizabeth A. Chesney Zegura, “Toward a Feminist Reading of Rabelais,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15.1 (1985): 124–134; Freccero, “Damning Haughty Dames”; “The ‘Instance’ of the Letter: Woman in the Text of Rabelais,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book, 45–55; Father Figures; “Queer Rabelais?”; François Rigolot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity,” pmla 109.2 (1994): 225–237, and “The Three Temptations of Panurge: Women’s Vilification and Christian Humanist Discourse,” in François Rabelais: Critical Assessments, ed. J.-C. Carron (Baltimore: 1995), 83–102; Amy Staples, “Primal Scenes/Primal Screens: The Homosocial Economy of Dirty Jokes,” in High Anx-

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

435

other hand, war epics or military biographies30 in which women are likewise absent or confined to minor roles do not indulge in much sexual humor; nor do they end with paeans to co-educational life. Here is a writer who mines the extra-gross register of fabliaux31 and seems happy to ignore women altogether,32 while also proposing, in the Thélème chapters, a view of womanhood that seems more enlightened but feels unconnected with the story. The abbey’s keystone is the idea that there cannot ever be women without men or men without women, at least in a properly reformed life, and as a prelude to lifelong mutual love. Yet our heroes are and remain just that: men without women. The second book’s ending and the non-ending of the third one are more than enough to suggest that this fact may be a symbolic puzzle rather than a matter of convenience or convention.

∵ Any attempt to sort out this problem must distinguish, first, between the books that came before and after Thélème, not only because twelve years separate Gargantua from the Third Book, but because the latter makes a protracted impossibility out of the very concept that the abbey exalted as a given; and second, between the first two books themselves, insofar as Pantagruel did not need the closing that Rabelais’s second effort, which ‘rewrites’ the first in many ways,33 saw fit to invent. No elegant couples redeem the last pages of a story

30

31

32

33

iety: Masculinity in Early Modern France, ed. K.P. Long (Kirksville: 2002), 37–54; Elisabeth Hodges, “Rabelais and Feminism,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais, 174–181. Cf. Bayard’s biographers: for Symphorien Champier (1525), the hero refused anything that would subject him to women; Jacques de Mailles (1527) mentions, once, his life-long platonic “amytié” for a married lady. With paradoxical results. The walls of Paris idea (Pantagruel, ch. 15) inverts an allegory of virtue (Glidden, “Rabelais, Panurge, and the Anti-Courtly Body,” er 25 [1991]: 35–60) and petrifies a narrative cliché on Parisian women, erasing complete, actual bodies (of both sexes; see Hodges, “Rabelais and Feminism”) and challenging representation itself. The lion-fox story, by contrast, stages a single female body (but a decrepit one), exposed by two animals who (like the little devil on Popefigland, in Quart livre, ch. 47) have no idea what a “callibistrys” is: carnal “knowledge” and storytelling do not mix as easily as it seems. Despite appearances, he does not belong in the brotherhood of comic writers who ensnare female protagonists in lewd goings-on to demonstrate how selfish, nasty, and sex-crazed women really are. According to Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven: 1991), 148 (cf. Screech, Rabelais, 118–130). Thus, Thélème is a “laborious,” “polite,” expurgated version of the “ideal evangelical community allusively adumbrated at the end of Pantagruel.”

436

cornilliat

that has enjoyed ridiculing human love along the way, most notably in two successive, pivotal episodes which, as Carla Freccero has established,34 work together in this respect: in one a woman does appear, and has to endure spectacular abuse; in the other a woman is jilted without even being allowed to appear.35 First comes the only moment, in the entire span of Rabelais’s four books, when a key character is shown engaging in courtship.36 His victory over Thaumaste having gone to his head, Panurge sets his sights on a beautiful and prominent “dame de Paris;” he presses her with ribald effrontery, is rebuffed several times, and takes revenge by sprinkling the lady’s best clothes, during Corpus Christi Mass, with the ground genitals of a bitch in heat; she is instantly harassed by dogs and ends up pursued, during the procession that follows, by over 600,000 of them,37 who piss all over her. In two outrageous chapters, the inexhaustible resource of romance is not just savagely caricatured, but definitively spent. No less significant, however, is what the episode avoids doing, which drives many a novella. The dogs’ assault strongly suggests a rape without being one; nor is it murder, except as far as the “lycisque” (bitch) is concerned; nor does it amount to the kind of punishment described in some of the Decameron’s most famous tales.38 The point is not to kill, violate, or expose a woman out of enraged desire, but to soil her fancy dress and social standing (up to her door, but no further), to the mirth of everyone: good-natured laughter39 responds to a scene that both exaggerates and mitigates violence while

34 35

36

37

38

39

Freccero, “Damning Haughty Dames,” “The ‘Instance’ of the Letter,” and Father Figures, 31–37. See Huchon, Rabelais (Paris: 2011), 110 and 240, and Bazola, “La femme dans la vie et l’ œuvre de Rabelais” on Rabelais’s own elusive Parisian liaison, with a widow who bore him two children. Pantagruel, ch. 21–22. See notably Freccero, “Damning Haughty Dames”; Rigolot, “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity,” and “The Three Temptations of Panurge” (Christian interpretation of the Lady’s plight); Myriam Marrache-Gouraud, “Hors toute intimidation,” 53–56; E. Bruce Hayes, Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais (Farnham: 2010), 129–138. Over 600 only in the first edition, as Freccero notes (“Damning Haughty Dames”). The edit makes the number even more unreal (cf. the Parisian victims of the giant’s miction in Gargantua, ch. 17). See e. g. v, 8, where the ghost of a naked woman is (over and over) pursued and devoured by dogs; or the vengeance of viii, 7, in which a woman is exposed, naked, to the July sun for a whole day. Cf. the case of Mme de Roncex, in Heptameron, 11: because it was not rape, she ends up laughing of her own scatological mishap, even though it exposed and humiliated her horribly.

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

437

targeting social and religious pretense.40 Still, Rabelais knows that he is pushing the envelope: that is why he added “et chamberieres de rire” in later editions; if chambermaids laugh too, then (hopefully) women as such are not the target.41 As for Panurge, his peculiar perversity sets him apart from the rapists or murderers we meet elsewhere: led as he is by parody (which unmasks lust and greed behind courtly or Petrarchan love42), rejection does not bother him.43 He is only acting the part(s); a grand spectacle is what he seeks, and gets.44 The episode’s extravagant crudeness is a resultant of two dodges: this is neither a love story nor a rape story, but something that parodies both as though they amounted to the same thing (which they often do45). This helps explain Pantagruel’s approval (he finds the show “very fine and novel”), however troubling it may seem—not to mention inconsistent with the scruples that the giant will feel next, over having done his own “dame de Paris” wrong.46 Wisdom’s nod is needed to confirm the (relative) innocuity of the Fool’s performance, its great success as “mystere”47 and, implicitly, its legitimacy as satire.48 We note also that the clothes of the “haulte dame” resemble those of the Thélémites: in one

40

41 42 43

44

45 46 47 48

On this targeting, see Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, 140; Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Nashville-London: 1998), 110–114; Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007), 241–243, and “Provocation et perplexité: Le double éloge paradoxal des dettes et de la rhétorique (Tiers Livre ii à v),” er 50 (2010): 45–65 (51–52). For Freccero (“Damning Haughty Dames”) and Staples (“Primal Scenes/Primal Screens”), the target is a woman first. Both sides have a point. Cf. also the Greek “lycisque orgoose,” replacing (as if to euphemize) the original “chienne en chaleur.” See Demerson, L’ esthétique de Rabelais, 50–52; also Tournon, “En sens agile,” 148; Renner, “Provocation et perplexité.” P 21, 204. When he drops his “faulx visaige” (mask, 206), he is ready to complete his masterpiece (cf. the pranks, some aimed at women, described in ch. 16: this one goes to the next level). See Bowen, “Rabelais’s Panurge as homo rhetoricus,” in In laudem Caroli: Renaissance and Reformation Studies for Charles G. Nauert, ed. J.V. Mehl (Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies) 49 (Kirksville: 1998), 125–133, and Renner, “Provocation et perplexité.” His goal is “venir au dessus [de la dame]” (“to prevail over her”/“to climb on top of her”): the former sense is what he is really after. Cf. Freccero (Father Figures, 31), who also argues, however (“Damning Haughty Dames” and Father Figures, 33–34), that the lady’s resistance puts the trickster on the losing side of their dialogue. Either way, he is not the paragon of raw virility he claims to be (as the Tiers Livre will amply confirm). As is bitterly proved by Heptameron 10, the paradigmatic story of Amadour and Florinde. In fact, Panurge’s sexual cynicism allows the preservation of the giant’s virtue (Freccero, Father Figures, 35–36). Or farce, as Hayes has shown in great detail in Rabelais’s Radical Farce. Still: Pantagruel, who guffawed upon hearing Panurge’s recipe for the walls of Paris, does

438

cornilliat

case they express vanity, fair game for the Fool; in the other they signify “honneur” and concord between the sexes. There is no contradiction: the lady and Panurge are of the world that Rabelais derides; Thélème, with its vice-cleansing honor, is an effort to imagine an alternative. But there is a disconnection: the reformed version allows the writer to represent as its very basis, in a restricted space, generic men and women together; the corrupt version seems barred from doing the same with individuals in the world at large, where contact only produces a garish yet fleeting image. The following chapter shows Pantagruel, as he leaves Paris to go fight in Utopia, in receipt of a letter sent by a lady “who he had been close to for a good length of time.” The letter contains a gold ring with a fake diamond, which Panurge understands to mean “Dy amant faulx” (“Say, false lover”); while no further text is found on the paper, the ring has an inscription, “why hast thou forsaken me” in Hebrew. Pantagruel regrets not having “said farewell” to the lady and wants to return “to make his peace with her;” Epistémon dissuades him by recalling the “parting of Aeneas from Dido” (Aeneid, iv).49 Rabelais borrowed the rebus from a novella by Masuccio Guardati; the words are the last uttered by Jesus on the cross.50 Key to any appreciation of Virgil’s epic or Masuccio’s short story is the fact that we know the woman involved: in one case we pity her fate (Aeneas does not change his mind); in the other we smile at her resourcefulness (Filippo returns after deciphering the message). But we had never heard of the “dame de Paris” Pantagruel is suddenly said to have courted and will never hear about her again. As a device allowing some other meaning to be underlined,51 this incident confirms that the tale has no need for a true female character; it conjures up a feminine figure as though for the sole purpose of erasing her.52 Does this enhance or displace, amplify or modify the epic topos according to which a woman and the love that she both inspires and endures

49

50 51 52

not laugh here, as though laughter—in his case alone—might have suggested insensitivity rather than benevolence. P 23–24, 210–212. Epistémon had already removed young Pantagruel from the “papal land” of Avignon, where he had fallen, in less than three days, for the promiscuous ways of local women (ch. 5). But in Hebrew instead of the original Aramaic. See Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, 13. Notably via the inscription, stripped of its acquired erotic context and returned to its original religious one. For Freccero (“The ‘Instance’ of the Letter” and “Queer Rabelais?”), both the “dame” and her writing “resist masculine complicity.” Pantagruel does not understand; neither does Panurge, as long as he looks for writing where it is not. See also Alice Fiola Berry, “L’ invisibilité du visible. La lettre de la dame parisienne,” in Sans autre guide: Mélanges offerts à Marcel Tetel, eds. P. Desan et al. (Paris: 1999), 25–32.

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

439

have to be left behind? With woman and passion missing from the scene, the ethos that is supposed to be tested against both loses substance as well.53 As for marriage, it is in fact mentioned at the end of Pantagruel, which features a farcical wedding, organized by Panurge (the defeated Anarche marries an “old whore” who will soon “bea[t] him like plaster” but, says the trickster, will not “fart” as chestnuts do when roasted whole, because she is “well split open at the bottom”); and the epilogue, in its original version, announces a sequel that will tell of Pantagruel’s marriage to an Indian princess; to which later editions add that Panurge too will get married, and cuckolded within a month.54 Anarche’s wedding parodies the grand action that Pantagruel initiates at the same moment, namely the transport of a huge population of Utopians (men, women, and children) to Dipsody, compared to “the children of Israel” leaving Egypt: no emphasis on couples is needed to imply that this is a society made of families.55 Thus Thélème can be said to crown two parallel mock-epics in a manner that spells out a lesson left implicit and ambiguous in the first one (the first version involves “women and children,” but marriage as happy end is a joke; the second version restores marriage as a dignified figure of the end, but separates it from the narrative56). Yet the abbey can also look like a sideshow against the longer logical arc that promises57 Panurge a cheating wife only to postpone the comeuppance he deserves,58 and announces a heroic marriage for Pantagruel only to forsake its narrative potential when the giant defers to his father’s authority. Seen in this light, Thélème’s idealizing of love and marriage is another way to eschew a love-and-marriage event. Since we know that Gargantua will later wed Badebec, the ‘prequel’ could have bothered to introduce her: it does not. What is true of endings is also true of origins. ‘Romans de chevalerie’ (including outrageously parodical ones, like Folengo’s Baldus) typically enjoy explain53

54 55

56 57

58

The giant’s purely retrospective concern is that he has not been civil. He is as far removed from Aeneas’s quandary as the lady’s clever message is from Dido’s raging eloquence (see Aeneid, iv, 279–396). P 31, 237–238; and 34, 244. P 31, 237. The Third Book’s first chapter will expand on this theme by highlighting the Utopians’ exceptional fecundity (seven children at least, both male and female, per couple), owing to the quality of the men’s sperm and to the appetite and perfect architecture of the women’s wombs (261; Rabelais combines two competing explanations: see Huchon’s note, oc, 1371). While overpopulation is not the reason why so many Utopians should travel to Dipsody, they will do so as the picture of sexual harmony and fertility. And, as Bernd Renner reminded me, restricts it to the ‘happy few.’ If, as Duval says, the end of the first epic is perfect as it is, then the epilogue’s promises are empty (and reveal the emptiness of epic conventions); which the Tiers Livre will invent a new way to confirm. Which delivers it by other means, by making a story out of postponement itself.

440

cornilliat

ing how the father and mother of the hero met, fell in love, got married (or not), and had a child. Even the Chroniques Gargantuines tell us how Gargantua’s parents, created by Merlin, discovered (like Adam and Eve) their sexual nature and proceeded to conceive the hero.59 Pantagruel eliminates this material: not only does Badebec die in childbirth (the hero could not have come into the world “without choking his mother”), but we see and hear nothing of her;60 which in turn makes a hash of Gargantua’s presupposed love by pitting it against fatherly pride in the farcical trap of the next chapter.61 Gargantua softens the recipe: we do meet Gargamelle, who survives her son’s birth; but she plays no role in his education, and is killed off in turn, some time later, in the most offhand manner.62 We are told, though, how Gargantua’s parents got married and enjoyed playing “the two-backed beast”; but the narrator is as brief and flippant on this matter as he is long-winded on the side subject of 11-month pregnancies (and their consequences for the sexual mores of wives and widows63), or, a few pages later, on that of strange births (following a detailed account of Gargantua’s own: the blocking of his mother’s lower conduits by anti-diarrhea medication forced the baby to travel upwards and exit “par l’aureille”).64 Thus a parody of medical and legal discourse replaces what this kind of tale traditionally makes of the hero’s first appearance. All told, either the narrative figure and function of pregnancy and maternity are suppressed altogether (in Pantagruel), or (in Gargantua) they give way to specious exposés that poke fun at the role of background knowledge and veracity assumptions in fiction, using the female body as foil.65

59

60 61 62

63

64 65

Cf. Baldus, book i. See Bowen, “Rabelais and Folengo Once Again,” in Rabelais in Context. Proceedings of the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference, ed. B.C. Bowen (Birmingham, AL: 1993), 133– 146; Grandes et Inestimables Chroniques, in oc, 158. Except the procession of salt-related items that comes out of her belly before Pantagruel appears (ch. 2). Pantagruel, ch. 3. Badebec’s epitaph (144) completes the process. G 37, 86. Gargamelle dies of joy when her son returns from Paris (as an adult: see Desrosiers-Bonin, “Rabelais et la nature féminine,” 36), at least according to an obscure chronicle: “For my part,” the narrator insists, “I don’t know a thing about it, and [don’t] care about her or anybody else.” A voice with its own legitimacy problem loudly dismisses anything that is expected to connect women and narrative. See Gérard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophète. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua et Le Quart Livre, (er) 32 (Geneva: 1997), 417–432. On the ambiguity of this discourse and its taboo-breaking value, see Patricia EichelLojkine, Excentricité et humanisme: Parodie, dérision et détournement des codes à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2002), 160–162. Gargantua, ch. 3 and 6. See Bromilow, “Inside Out. Female Bodies in Rabelais,” Forum for Modern Language Stud-

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

441

In the middle of the latter, however, Gargamelle has a brief conversation with her husband. Grandgousier shows some solicitude as he sees his wife experience what they both think are birth pangs (and is in fact a belly ache caused by eating too much tripe). In the original version, he quotes John 16:21, to remind her that women suffer during labor but forget about it once the child is born (by which Jesus means that we are sad not to see him anymore, but will be all the happier when he returns). Gargamelle approves (she’d rather hear the Gospel than the life of Saint Margaret, traditionally read to women during childbirth), and then adds: “would to God you had cut it off!” Grandgousier jokingly suggests that she get a knife; she demurs but maintains that her husband’s member is to blame. Rabelais later edited out the Evangelical reference; he also shortened the subsequent defense of the aural birth’s plausibility, retaining its surface argument (we must believe everything we read; nothing in the Bible contradicts this story; God could have made women have children that way), but suppressing the Scriptural clues that hinted at the difference between credulity (which the tale mocks while pretending to require it) and faith (which the tale defines a contrario by pretending it is but credulity).66 Clearest, in the first version, was Gargamelle’s embrace of the Gospel and rejection of superstition, which forced readers to keep a holy message, unbridled scatology and jokes about sex jostling in their minds. By blending spirit and flesh in this manner, Rabelais thwarts the ordinary flow of narrative information:67 instead of details about the mother’s history and character as she gives birth to the hero, we get a clash between a divine message that concerns all mankind (postlapsarian women and men are women in labor when it comes to expecting God) and the spectacle of a body that lacks all sense of decorum—yet engages in playful dialogue, toying with the idea of lopping off the husband’s organ as compensation for the wife’s torment.68 Further,

66

67 68

ies 44 (2008): 27–39, on the resulting displacement of the mother’s body (which is not Bakhtin’s generic Carnival body) as a “privileged site” of attraction and repulsion. See Screech, L’ Evangélisme de Rabelais: Aspects de la satire religieuse au xvie siècle, (er) 2 (Geneva: 1959), 10–15; Defaux, Rabelais agonistes, 428–430; Nicolas Le Cadet, L’Evangélisme fictionnel: Les livres rabelaisiens, le Cymbalum Mundi, L’Heptaméron (1532–1552) (Paris: 2010), 209–211. See Gray, Rabelais et le comique du discontinu (Paris: 1994), especially 109–120. In ch. 11, Gargantua’s nurses too play with this idea, along with the (codpiece-clad) thing itself. Elsewhere the phallus is the “life-giving kingpin” that couples the (symmetrical) “four buttocks that engendered you” (Third Book, prologue, 259). On the reversibility of sexual signs in Rabelais, see e.g. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: 1979); Eichel-Lojkine, Excentricité et humanisme; and Bromilow, “Inside Out. Female Bodies in Rabelais”; on the Androgyne as a figure of agapè

442

cornilliat

the exchange is based on error: in fact Gargamelle has a severe case of the runs; only the “restringent” administered by a “dirty old hag” will force an unnatural birth process. Yet the couple’s premature diagnosis only reinforces the point of the set-up: John’s message is invoked even though the mother’s body is not yet where it thinks it is (but busy producing excrements). So, the divide between the spiritual and the physical is even wider than it could be, which is precisely what makes the former relevant to the latter: the error only confirms the rupture of which prayer and laughter are born. Rabelais’s censoring of his own text weakens this by removing the one clear reference that might prevent reducing Gargamelle’s predicament to a farce played out at her expense and amplified by a mock-erudite send-up of feminine physiology: it could be, instead, that the fraught subject of feminine physiology is one of the touchstones used by the fledgling narrative to make fun of itself.69 Why does this story sacrifice its mothers and its love interests in such an ostensible, systematic fashion? Why not erase them quietly or, if abuse is the point, keep abusing them? What seems clear is that our author wants to be seen getting rid of women as narrative material, as narrative ‘tropes,’ along with the logic of ‘chevalerie’ (including its mock versions) that requires their presence. The comparison with Baldus is instructive, in that Folengo is at least as savage as Rabelais with the genre: yet female characters, while secondary, remain present throughout his work. From the courtly figures they (sort of) assume at the beginning, they are transformed into novella fodder (disgrace and humiliation ensue); then into romance sorceresses, who need to be caught, stripped, flogged, and burned at the stake;70 and finally, past the gates of Hell, into nothing less than the Furies themselves. In this darkening feminine landscape,71 Baldus and his motley crew find an antagonist. Again, one might argue that Rabelais goes even further by suppressing female characters; but it could also be the case that he resists both romance and this strand of satire by keeping

69 70

71

(Gargantua, ch. 8), sexual union / disunion / erasure, and “queer potential,” see Freccero, “The ‘Instance’ of the Letter” and “Queer Rabelais?”; also Rothstein, “Androgyne”; Romain Menini, Rabelais et l’ intertexte platonicien, (er) 47 (Geneva: 2009), 155–175. On the ambivalence of fiction itself in Rabelais, see Le Cadet, L’Evangélisme fictionnel; also Bouchard, Avant le roman, 176–185. In real life, however, the “witches” who meet this fate are old, ignorant, and innocent: they are condemned in lieu of high ladies, says the narrator (see book xxi, 1521 version, vv. 576– 581). There are exceptions, starting with the poet’s comic Muses. As for Baldus, betrayed by his wife, he praises a perfect lady named Crispis; but his speech (xxiii, 1521 version) disappears in later editions.

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

443

women away from the story’s development, and then having the companions’ “deeds” focus on what the company lacks.72

∵ At the beginning of the Third Book, Panurge, now lord of Salmagundi, symbolically ruins Thélème’s ideal, twice: first by excess, then by defect. First he liquidates it, by performing his own (parodical) version of the abbey’s welcome: incapable of governing himself, he opens “banquets and feasts” to all comers, “good companions, young girls, and cute wenches,” thereby dilapidating, in a few days, the revenue of his just acquired castleship for three years.73 Second, after Pantagruel frees him (against his express wish) from the debts thus incurred, he develops a sudden urge to get married: marriage, in his mind, replaces the mutual dependence of debtors and creditors, in a caricature of the Paulinian dictum invoked by the giant (“Owe nothing save love and mutual affection,”74 a principle embodied by Thélème’s couples) in response to his friend’s praise of debts. Because he wants to get married on such a basis, Panurge needs even more to be reassured, by way of counsel or prediction, that the spouse he craves will not cuckold, beat, or rob him. The consultations of the Third Book (and, by implication, the travels of the ensuing Fourth one) are fueled by his inability to act on this new wish: his “philautie,”75 which made his life an open-ended feast, now paralyzes him. He has no use for the “will” that governed the Thélémites:76 while thelema found its best expression in gender harmony, Panurge swings from enjoying the presence of “wenches” to dreading what his hypothetical wife will do to him—which in turn unleashes, in him and in those tasked to advise him, a torrent of discourse about women and 72

73 74 75

76

Thélème may be problematic; but in Baldus the palace of Culfora the witch-queen must be destroyed before the story can end (book xxii in the 1521 version). For a wider comparison, see Bowen, “Rabelais and Folengo”; Anthony P. Russell, “Epic Agon and the Strategy of Reform in Folengo and Rabelais,” Comparative Literature Studies 34 (1997): 119–148. Third Book, ch. 2, 264. On the ethos of this wastefulness, see Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, 39–40. Third Book, ch. 5, 273; cf. Rom 13:18. Says Pantagruel: “philautie and self-love is deceiving you,” “amour de soy vous deçoit” (Third Book, ch. 29, 347). On this Erasmian notion, see Screech, Rabelais. The vice of those who care only about themselves contradicts both charity (agapè, caritas), which “seeketh not her own” (i Cor 13:5; cf. G 8, 24) and the self-knowledge (“know thyself”) expected from the wise. See Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, 126. “Aren’t you certain of your will? The main point lies there,” says Pantagruel (Third Book, ch. 10, 284). See e.g. Nykrog, “Thélème, Panurge et la Dive Bouteille”; Desrosiers-Bonin, Rabelais et l’ humanisme civil; and Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre.

444

cornilliat

marriage, feeding on the ever-unfolding ‘querelle des femmes’ and discussions (or declamations) on the question of matrimony.77 This double subject offers a great deal of contradictory substance; it is also a red herring, since what drives the debate is a fear born of Panurge’s own bottomless self-concern. Indeed, the resulting ‘story’ being even less likely than before, as André Tournon has shown, to give voice to actual female characters,78 one wonders whether the new Panurge provides Rabelais with a cause or an alibi: is he the symbol or the symptom of an inability to fully ‘welcome’ women in the sense that Thélème does? The predictions that Pantagruel arranges for his friend’s benefit are subject to divergent interpretations, whose conflict is made more acute by the very doubt that sought solace in them.79 As far as counsel is concerned, we are told 77

78

79

See e.g. Screech, Rabelaisian Marriage; Angenot, Les champions des femmes; Luce Guillerm et al. (eds.), Le miroir des femmes, i: Moralistes et polémistes au xvie siècle (Lille: 1983); Jordan, Renaissance Feminism; Berriot-Salvadore, Les femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance; Malenfant, Argumentaires de l’ une et l’autre espèce de femme; Leushuis, Le mariage et l’ ‘amitié courtoise’; Reeser, Moderating Masculinity, ch. 3; Demonet, “Pantagrueline Humanism”; Éliane Viennot, ed., Revisiter la “querelle des femmes”: Discours sur l’ égalité/inégalité des sexes, de 1750 au lendemain de la Révolution (Saint-Étienne, 2012); Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois: Paradoxe, scandale et propriété dans le Tiers livre, (er) 53 (Geneva: 2013), especially 380–382 and 404–407; and Huchon, oc, 1349–1351. At the moment the debate involved two of Rabelais’s friends: André Tiraqueau, author of a treatise on marriage law (De legibus connubialibus, copiously used in the Tiers livre), and Amaury Bouchard, who attacked Tiraqueau in defense of women. Another friend, Jean Bouchet, had weighed in on the ‘pro-woman’ side in his Jugement poetic de l’ honneur femenin (1538). See Tournon, “Un silence signé Rabelais,” on this “silence” and absence (the exception is the sibyl of Panzoust, on whom see below). Hence also, perhaps, the balancing role played by the book’s dedication to “The Spirit of the Queen of Navarre” (248), asking Marguerite’s “esprit,” freed from worldly feeling and sexual identity, to leave its celestial abode (far above Thélème) to come down and peruse another tome of Pantagruel’s “joyous deeds”—now reduced to advising a fellow who (far below Thélème) is unable to “do” anything. See e.g. Tournon, “En sens agile”; 166; Huchon, “La poétique dévoyée du Tiers livre,” in Rabelais et le Tiers livre, ed. E. Kotler (Nice: 1996), 97–115; Bauschatz, “Rabelais and Marguerite De Navarre”; Mary B. McKinley, “Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre et la dédicace du Tiers livre: Voyages mystiques et missions terrestres,” Romanic Review 94 (2003): 169–183; Menini, Rabelais et l’ intertexte platonicien, 95–98. By addressing her “esprit,” the epigram elides the queen’s femininity; yet if this ultimate “lady of high degree” ends up liking what she reads (halfway between her current apatheia and Panurge’s worrying), it is not just a “spirit,” but a woman who will do so. Invariably the “oracles,” according to the giant, announce that Panurge will be cuckolded, beaten, and robbed by his wife; and he has to mount a counter-interpretation (PoueyMounou, Panurge comme lard en pois, explains how; see e.g. 225–226 and passim). About the effects of this set-up on the art of dialogue, see Eliane Kotler, “La question du mariage

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

445

that the matter of marriage is “indifferent”:80 it is one’s personal will—what Panurge lacks—that determines whether it is a good idea to marry or not.81 In its absence, authorized advice proves (repeatedly) unable to bridge the gap that separates the advisee from his decision. Pantagruel, for his part, has no trouble interpreting even the most equivocal utterances on this topic, either because they confirm the role of one’s own “sens” in settling indifferent matters, or because his own doctrine makes instant sense of them, as happens when the philosopher Trouillogan seems to say that Panurge should both have and not have a wife. Having a wife, the giant explains, is “having her for such use as Nature created her for, which is for the aid, pleasure and society of man”; not having a wife is refraining from loving and obeying her to the point of neglecting God, friends, studies, and country.82 Thus distinction solves contradiction, and ulterior choices are laid out, which turn out to be anything but indifferent: for what makes a marriage “good” is not just one’s sense applied to the relationship itself, but its conformity with a larger world of values that carry their own (male) obligations.83 To Panurge, on the other hand, clarity leads back to ambiguity as soon as his own behavior (i.e. choice of behavior) is involved in the slightest. Let us briefly consider two examples.

80

81

82

83

de Panurge: Une enquête sur les limites du dialogue,” Cahiers Textuel 15 (1996): 33–47; and Véronique Zaercher, Le dialogue rabelaisien. Le Tiers Livre exemplaire, (er) 38 (Geneva: 2000). See Screech, L’ Evangélisme de Rabelais, 110–111. Pantagruel describes “indifferent” matters in general (ch. 7, 278), which we make good or bad; later we understand (although Panurge does not) that marriage is one of them (ch. 10). Cf. the giant’s “Ricochet song,” which responds in kind to Panurge’s contradictory pleas (ch. 9); and the “oracle” given by the dying poet Raminagrobis, who simply advises Panurge to “take the lady, take her not” (ch. 22): both are fine. If Panurge could hear that lesson, he would not need it to the degree he does. Third Book, ch. 35, 364. For Duval (The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre) and Oumelbanine Zhiri (L’ extase et ses paradoxes. Essai sur la structure narrative du Tiers Livre [Paris: 1999]), the Tiers Livre is indeed another “book of Pantagruel,” whose “inveterate love” (ch. 16, 303) keeps the story going. On this ‘synthesis’ of arguments for and against marriage, see Malenfant, Argumentaires de l’ une et l’ autre espèce de femme, 283–286; also Bauschatz, “Rabelais and Marguerite De Navarre”; and Tristan Vigliano, Humanisme et juste milieu au siècle de Rabelais: Essai de critique illusoire (Paris: 2009), 621–623. Hence a possible accord between Thélème’s ‘free’ mutual love, Pantagruel’s deferral to parental authority, and Gargantua’s angry defense of the latter (in ch. 48) as a condition to “felicité de mariage.” Yet the difference in mood and emphasis reveals women’s actual subjection instead of papering over it: in the real world, husbands need to know their priorities and fathers must ‘defend’ their precious daughters; at Thélème, it was enough to let honor follow its natural course.

446

cornilliat

Since Panurge did not receive the special grace of continence, says Hippothadée the theologian, he should marry.84 Our hero agrees warmly and asks whether he will be cuckolded. No, says Hippothadée, “if God please.” Panurge misunderstands: how could he figure out what God wants? That is not what Hippothadée meant; yet the Bible gives some sense of what pleases God, and a husband would find there that he will not be cuckolded if he chooses a wife “descended from good people, brought up in virtues and decency, […] loving and fearing God”; and if he, in turn, does his best to love her and be as virtuous with her as he wants her to be with him.85 Panurge (ignoring the husband’s role) misunderstands again:86 such a perfect woman, he says, no longer exists. Rabelais may well share the theologian’s view, but the (comic) point of the chapter as written is not to convey it, with Panurge as foil; for Panurge’s attitude, which makes the conveying so necessary, also makes it pointless. We can take refuge in Hippothadée’s arguments; but can we fully absorb the fact of which we laugh, namely that Panurge will not—ever—accept the lesson?87 Upon hearing the “Won’t I be a cuckold?” question, the physician Rondibilis (Rabelais’s colleague Guillaume Rondelet) talks with authority about women’s physiology: according to his Platonic theory, the uterus is an autonomous animal that females have trouble controlling. This is what makes the other sex “so inconstant and imperfect” that Nature seems to have erred “when she built woman.” “Thus are all women women”; and it follows from this fatal truism that cuckoldry is a “natural” risk of marriage, since men are poorly equipped to satisfy the animal in question. It also follows that a virtuous

84 85

86 87

For it is better to do so than to burn in the fire of concupiscence (Paul, iCor 7:9). Third Book, ch. 30, 350; see Kotler, “La question du mariage de Panurge,” 44 and notes. A wife reflects her husband’s qualities, which engages his responsibility: see e.g. Screech, L’ Evangélisme de Rabelais; Jordan, Renaissance Feminism; Leushuis, Le mariage et l’‘amitié courtoise’, 178–181; Malenfant, Argumentaires de l’ une et l’autre espèce de femme, 258–263 and 294–295; Demonet, “Pantagrueline Humanism”; Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois, 361. On the link between this description and Thélème, see Verdun-L. Saulnier, Rabelais i. Rabelais dans son enquête: La sagesse de Gargantua, le Dessein de Rabelais (Paris: 1983), 167–168; and Tournon, “Un silence signé Rabelais,” 80. See Pouey-Mounou’s detailed analysis in Panurge comme lard en pois, 455–457. This makes lethal fun of many assumptions concerning rhetoric and morality. Rabelaisian comedy has no end, not because it mitigates opposition, but because it maximizes it: its inconvenient foil cannot be defeated, and yet remains ‘one of us’; Pantagruelism neither transforms him nor rejects him. Analyzing Rabelaisian irony in its relation to folly, Renner takes a similar premise to a somewhat different conclusion. “‘Qu’un fol enseigne bien un saige’: Folie et ironie dans le Tiers livre de Pantagruel,” L’Année rabelaisienne 1 (2016): 161–181.

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

447

woman (thus a bit less of a woman qua “woman”) deserves special praise, for having reduced “this frenzied animal to obedience,” a challenge that virtuous men do not have to face.88 Panurge, predictably worried,89 wants to know if there is a remedy: yet another misunderstanding, since the physician has chalked up the problem to Nature; no remedy is forthcoming in the usual sense of the term. Yet one will come after all, in the form of a modified Aesopic tale. The story of Cuckoldry and Jealousy (two gods whose festivals are on the same day) establishes that in order to be protected by the former (that is, be cuckolded), husbands have to worship the latter, i.e. spy on their wives, lock them up, etc. The tale delights companions and advisors alike, who proceed to discuss women’s habit of coveting what is forbidden.90 This episode was denounced by François de Billon’s Fort inexpugnable de l’ honneur du sexe feminin (1555) as proof of Rabelais’s contempt for women;91 but one needs not defend Rondibilis’s doctrine to realize that the fabulist corrects what could be concluded from the physician’s eloquence. It seems that women, defective as they are, should not be controlled by prohibitions:92 the change of register and the paradoxical form of the tale (which pretends to recommend the cult of Cuckoldry) intimate that they should be left free (to control themselves), something that the physician does not have the authority to prescribe, but the man, husband, possible cuckold, and amateur storyteller is happy to suggest.

88 89

90 91

92

Third Book, ch. 32, 355–357. See Screech, Rabelaisian Marriage, 84sqq.; Rabelais, 247sqq.; Roland Antonioli, Rabelais et la médecine (Geneva: 1976), 250–255. See Lawrence Kritzman, The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: 1991), ch. 2; David LaGuardia, Intertextual Masculinity in French Literature: Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles (Aldershot: 2008), 145–150. Third Book, ch. 33–34. As well as approved by the rabid Louenge des femmes (1551; see Demonet, “Pantagrueline Humanism,” 85; Huchon, Rabelais, 305). On the problem of Rondibilis’s misogyny, see Screech, Rabelaisian Marriage, 101; Antonioli, Rabelais et la médecine, 255; Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 191–192; Berry, “ ‘Written in the Mind With an Iron Pen’: The failure of misogynistic cliché in the Rondibilis episode of Rabelais’s Tiers livre (31–34),” French Studies 49.3 (1995): 275–282; Desrosiers-Bonin, “Rabelais et la nature féminine”; Leushuis, Le mariage et l’ ‘amitié courtoise’, 166–167; Malenfant, Argumentaires de l’une et l’autre espèce de femme, ii, iv; LaGuardia, Intertextual Masculinity, 151–158; Huchon, Rabelais, 305–306. I was unable to consult Cathy Schiffer, “Contextual Misogyny in the Tiers Livre,” Chimères 17.2 (1984): 53–67, and Pierre Goumarre, “Rabelais: Misogynie et misogamie,” Littératures 15 (1986): 59–71. Tournon (“En sens agile,” 84–85) noticed that there is in fact a direct contradiction, regarding marital surveillance, between the two parts of Rondibilis’s speech: Hippocrates requests it; the pseudo-Aesop advises against it.

448

cornilliat

This message echoes that of Thélème,93 where a similar observation (“we always undertake forbidden things”) justified the absence of any censoring: if “honor” is left free to do its work, it incites “virtuous deeds” and holds us back from vice. But Thélème did not place a special onus on women in this respect: as we saw, the abbey’s only ‘rule’ was gender-neutral. Assuming that women’s “animal” is even more prone to transgression than human nature in general, does it follow that the “goad” of honor, which also exists “by nature,” should be left even freer to operate in feminine souls? In fact the two sides of Rondibilis’s advice reflect a ‘reality’ that is now divided too: while it is morally true that women should be left free, it remains physically true that their “animal,” which has its own agenda (procreation-driven intercourse), should be satisfied as much as possible. This situation was bypassed by Thélème’s idealized view of gender symmetry;94 but in the intimacy of his home, according to Rondibilis, the responsible husband has to accept, along with both duties, the grain of salt that comes from their contradiction (in his wife’s nature as well as in his own, due to physiological limitations of which he is well aware). As for Panurge, the very notion of freedom escapes him, and the idea of freeing that insatiable beast, of all beings, can only take his anxiety off the deep end. Reasonable or repellent as it may sound to quarrelling 16th-century ears (not to mention ours), the physician’s speech has one strategic specificity: it attacks Panurge on two fronts at once. The moral front he can ignore as usual; but the physical one is less easily denied.95 Hence our hero’s annoyance at what he calls the doctor’s “barragouin,”96 which he understands well enough: the lesson is that he should marry and not worry. As to why, his understanding does not go that far: annoyance will only incite him to get rid of Rondibilis and try someone else. The advisers’ arguments may or may not be valid; but rhetoric’s effort, whether earnest or playful, flawed or reliable, is wasted on Panurge, except as a trigger for his own.97 Is there a mode of discourse that can still get through to the “philaute”?98 What of the sexual banter that Rabelaisian males like to 93 94 95 96 97 98

See Tournon, “En sens agile,” 85–89, and “Un silence signé Rabelais,” 81. But not by the Third Book’s first chapter, in which good (Utopian) use is made of the “animal” (see note 55). See Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 191–192, and her analysis of the “ring of Hans Carvel,” 197. Third Book, ch. 34, 361. Barbed exchange and payment follow. On which see the different takes of Marrache-Gouraud, “Hors toute intimidation,” Renner, Difficile est saturam non scribere, and Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois. Even folly, whose advice he is eager to hear (Third Book, ch. 38), will send him back to his problem (ch. 46).

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

449

share,99 having fun while verifying what they ‘know’ of women’s nature?100 This is indeed what the doctor’s lecture segues into, after the Cuckoldry tale: Carpalim, Ponocrates, Epistémon chime in with juicy anecdotes on women’s urge to disobey, indiscretion, and garrulousness.101 Panurge, however, no longer cares about this game: the joke is that jokes against women now serve to advance the concept of their (relative, but indispensable) freedom, whereas intolerance of such amusement is rooted in fear of what tolerance would yield. A famous passage of the Fourth Book will further illustrate what happens to this type of exchange as Pantagrueline fiction hurtles toward its “end.”

∵ Near the island of Chaneph, peopled by dangerous bigots, the ship is becalmed, the giant falls asleep, and his companions are bored out of their wits. When Pantagruel wakes up, Frère Jean asks, “in the highest good spirits”: “Maniere de haulser le temps en calme?”102 Panurge immediately seconds: “Remede contre fascherie?”;103 then all the companions in turn raise a series of playful problems, born of the hunger they feel. Instead of responding, Pantagruel orders a great feast, which restores everyone’s good spirits. The wind comes back, the companions thank God and, one after the other, pronounce themselves satisfied. Eusthenes, for example, had asked why the saliva of a man with an empty stomach is toxic to snakes and other poisonous animals; now that he is full, he simply notes that his saliva will no longer hurt such critters, and amplifies the point by giving a long list of them. Frère Jean, true to form, jumps at the opportunity to ask where “Panurge’s future wife”104 would fit in this catalog. Panurge pounces: “Are you speaking ill of women, […] you bald-assed monk?” The ensu99

100 101

102

103 104

See e.g. Pantagruel, ch. 26, 217–218. Led by Panurge, the companions boast about what they will do to the enemy army’s (alleged) 150,000 whores; the giant laughs amiably, then warns his friends that they might end up being the ones “ridden down with great blows of pike and lance.” Neither scenario will come to pass. Cf. Staples, “Primal Scenes/Primal Screens”; Malenfant, Argumentaires de l’une et l’autre espèce de femme, 89; LaGuardia, Intertextual Masculinity, 145–150. Including a reference to a “moral comedy,” The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, supposedly performed long ago in Montpellier by a group of students that included a certain “François Rabelais”. Tournon (“Un silence signé Rabelais”) shows what this farce tells us about the “silence” of women in the Third Book, and what could break it. Fourth Book, ch. 63. “Haulser le temps” means “to drink while waiting for the weather to improve” (Huchon, oc, 1581, n. 6). Frame keeps this implicit: “What’s a way to raise a breeze during a calm?” (cw, 579). “A remedy for feeling low?” (cw, 579). Fourth Book, ch. 65, 585.

450

cornilliat

ing exchange quickly rehearses a couple of topoi borrowed from the ‘querelle des femmes,’ with Panurge as advocate and Epistémon as prosecutor.105 Just as quickly, however, the trickster drops the subject and resumes the interrupted game; two more companions confirm that their questions have been answered. Then Panurge exclaims that he is no longer “fasché,” calls for another thanksgiving prayer, and praises the “blessed venerable Frère Jean,” whose question had initiated the game: Pantagruel now closes it, explaining, in a memorable speech, why food and drink make us so much happier. While this moment of delight will not last, it offers a rare example of harmony within the company, as though it had become, Panurge for once included, a genuine community. Said community, of course, is woman-free. Are we dealing with a bunch of men who overcome boredom and rekindle friendship by sharing jokes, some of them predictably aimed at the (absent) other sex? In fact, what makes the companions happy again is the synergy between their own improvisation and the feast; between their stomachs’ need, humorously verbalized, and its collective, fraternal fulfillment. Panurge almost takes the monk’s bait, but then changes course: has the banquet lifted, along with his spirits, the spell that binds him? It has not; from the perspective of his long-standing need, the remedy is a mere (but welcome) diversion, which Frère Jean’s swipe at his “future wife” could derail. The monk’s wit, which has acquired an ad hominem edge, makes him speak out of order, and ask a new question instead of expressing his postprandial bliss; it is Panurge who, saluting his friend with sudden generosity, notes that his initial request still needs an answer, which Pantagruel provides (by explaining that is has been provided). Thus is the circle closed and a precarious harmony is achieved—not only in the absence of women, but by stopping banter about women in its well-worn tracks. Yet Frère Jean’s quip is also a reminder that one question at least went unanswered and will remain a source of “fascherie.” This is also attested by a brief exchange that takes place just before the feast: having learned that Chaneph’s inhabitants are “hypocrites,” “bigots,” and “hermits” living off travelers’ alms, Panurge refuses to visit them, but wants to know if they are married, if anyone there is of the “feminine sex,” and if it is possible to “get a little hypocritical sport” with such female hypocrites; to which

105

It is not the first time: cf. their dialogue in Third Book, ch. 16, 304, on the sibyl of Panzoust. There Panurge brags that he is “very well off for women’s advice, and especially old women’s.” Moments later, he changes his mind (ch. 17, 307). On the debate that frames the episode and the unique status of the sibyl herself, see Weinberg, Rabelais et les leçons du rire, 127–147; also Demonet, “Pantagrueline Humanism,” 84; and Pouey-Mounou, Panurge comme lard en pois, 192–195.

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

451

Xenomanes responds that “hypocritesses” do live there with “great piety” and produce lots of “hypocritkins.”106 Chaneph is Thélème’s perfect counter-type, with hypocrisy replacing goodwill as governing energy; but we have already met a variety of anti-Thélèmes, such as Ennasin and Cheli,107 or even the farcical Basché château.108 In fact, gender relations play a prominent part in the entropy chronicled by the Fourth Book; but the part keeps changing. On some islands a vice (hypocrisy in Chaneph, vacuity in Ruach, avarice among the Fifth Book’s Furred Cats) is shared by both sexes. Others (like Ennasin, or the Fifth Book’s Ironware) lampoon sexual difference itself, at the expense of both sexes again.109 Still others imagine cohabitation without sexuality, like the Fifth Book’s Ringing Island;110 or suggest a war between males and females, but mock and displace the idea, as happens with Fastilent and the Chitterlings.111 In short, Panurge’s questioning allows us to verify that an island’s female residents, when they exist, simply share the moral character of the place: anticaritas112 has no assigned gender, any more than caritas or honor do. This being the case, should we assume that a band of brothers can embody, in the middle of conflict and chaos, what the abbey represented after Gargantua’s victory? Does the transient good time they enjoy near Chaneph offer an alternative, a viable figure of harmony worthy of the “séjour” that a monk and

106 107

108

109

110

111

112

Fourth Book, ch. 64, 581. On Ennasin (ch. 9), relationships enact word pairings (hole and peg, etc.); hence a bevy of sexual jokes, and kinship anarchy; but the underlying agenda is that young males marry old females for their money. In Cheli’s pretend courtly world (ch. 10), the king has his wife and daughters kiss all visitors, to Frère Jean’s utter disgust. Happily married, loved by his people, but cited by a corrupt prior and besieged by Shysteroos, the virtuous Basché uses fake weddings to beat up intruders (ch. 12–15): Thélème striking back, with a bitter laugh. Pantagruel, though, is no longer sure that such a story (told by Panurge) shows enough “fear of God” (cw, 472). Which inevitably mixes them up (see Eichel-Lojkine, Excentricité et humanisme, 247). Language play on the mechanics of coupling ends up suggesting that its instruments are more alike, because toy-like, than they are different. Where males are supposed to reproduce “without carnal copulation” (Fifth Book, ch. 3, 618). In the Quart livre, by contrast (ch. 32, 507), the fact that Nature reproduces that way is valorized, by Pantagruel himself. Sexual difference speaks to a higher unity—but would be wrong to literalize it. Fastilent is male, but his body parts speak otherwise (and defy representation); the Chitterlings are “female in sex” (ch. 29, 499), but many are in fact male, and they look like penises (the meaning of their queen’s name in Hebrew); see Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: 1990), part ii. The opponents’ presupposed sexes, just like their respective cults, are fake contraries (in the sense that contraries are fake), and their war is a moral sham. See Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 36 (Geneva: 1998), ch. 3.

452

cornilliat

a prince once imagined together? Soon, thanks to the new wind they greeted so happily, the companions reach Ganabim, the island of thieves, which Pantagruel is urged not to visit by an inner voice. Panurge and Frère Jean are at each other’s throats again, trading accusations of recklessness and cowardice:113 it becomes evident that the magical truce did not ensure progress, let alone redemption. The opposite of Thélème, as we just saw, can be a world where men and women are partners in (petty or heavy) crime, or one that keeps them apart. The islands illustrate both options; but why should the travelers be immune from the latter disease, as they drift further away from Utopia, endlessly performing their own silly squabbles? While the feast is inspiring, the Thalamège is not a sea-bound Thélème peopled by males “doing as they please” sans female company. The “Pentecôte”114 at Chaneph does convey a vital message about forgiveness and fraternity; but the comedy of degradation, which will soon strike again,115 is part of that message. The apostles prove terminally deficient: neither the cowardly Panurge nor the brutal Frère Jean retain the spirit they were so delighted to share. Outside the story’s purview, they may yet be saved; within it, Pantagruel keeps them together, offering moments of joy; but he will not reform his friends.116 Panurge will not get to a place where thelema rules, let alone achieve marriage as the fulfillment of “amytié” between reasonably similar men and women. Wildly different men is what we have, balanced by their opposition only;117 and divided, as much as united, by the laughter that explodes every time the balance breaks. The ethical chasm between the giant’s mysterious tolerance and the common sin that Panurge incarnates (reflected in turn by Frère Jean’s hardened behavior) will never close.118 Does this chasm suffice to represent the human 113 114

115

116

117 118

Fourth Book, ch. 66; on this implication of a (virtual) “juste milieu,” see Vigliano, Humanisme et juste milieu au siècle de Rabelais, 647. See Saulnier, Rabelais dans son enquête, vol. 2, 140; Paul J. Smith, Voyage et écriture: Étude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais, er (19) (Geneva: 1987), 194–197; Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre, 136–141. In the final chapter, Panurge, tricked by Frère Jean with Pantagruel’s tacit approval, will soil himself out of fear (such is the fate of the quasi-celestial food consumed earlier) amid general laughter—but deny it with bravura, and launch a final invitation to “drink.” On the many dimensions of this “end,” see e.g. Berry, The Charm of Catastrophe. A Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre (Chapel Hill: 2000). Cf. Vigliano, Humanisme et juste milieu au siècle de Rabelais, 596: pedagogy between the extremes is “sciemment et joyeusement impossible.” Pantagruelism knows and accepts this. In LaGuardia’s words (Intertextual Masculinity, 110): “two modes of being masculine.” Or three … It also limits the homoerotic dynamic that is suggested by their indestructible relation.

missing women: on the riddle of gender relations in rabelais

453

condition (and its only remedy), with women absent from the picture because they are, as usual, secondary and taken for granted? Or does the memory of Thélème, revived by the Fourth Book’s many parodies, allow us to infer that their continuing erasure119 is at least a sign of the problem as our author understands it? I have tried to argue the latter. What separates Panurge from Pantagruel morally (and “pantagruelism” from itself) is what separates concretely, if not men from women, at least Panurge from his “wife.” By making this obstacle more and more insurmountable, Rabelais is not emphasizing sexual difference as such, but whatever fails, in his eyes, to unite men and women in the “honor” (or lack thereof) they actually share; a failure often ignored by romance, but presented by many “nouvelles” as a matter of contrary sex characters, and blamed on women first. Considered in contrast to the perennially mixed bag of the company’s men, it seems to me that the abbey’s virtuous couples, but also the vicious couples of Chaneph, the ridiculous couplings of Ennasin, the many passing references to societies (good or bad) of similar “men and women”120 suggest that Rabelais easily envisions heterosexual relations in terms of gender symmetry (and vice versa). Yet he seems unable to build his story on that premise. Yet again, he will not build it on dissymmetry: he would rather elide females altogether, as is done, most spectacularly, in the Third Book, whose ostensible object is nowhere in sight.121 If ethical lopsidedness is to be shown, as it must, then it will be among ill-assorted men waiting (indefinitely) for a resolution that should come, in this world, from (joining) the other sex—but will not. It may be that heterosexual harmony122 remains what this fiction dreams

119

120

121 122

On this subject, which I have left out of the present discussion, see Freccero, “Queer Rabelais?”. Fascinating in this respect are the chapters later edited to form the end of the Fifth Book, where female figures are prominent (Huchon, oc, 1606): the Quint Essence, the Lanterns, Bacbuc, the Bottle. Did they help stage a perfect, ‘entelechial’ ending, or help ridicule it, as an abusively quintessential telos (cf. Huchon and Demonet, “L’essence du Quint Livre,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 227–241), the opposite of Thélème from the start (Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, 179)? Either way—that is, even as parody—Rabelais felt compelled to renounce and erase them. Starting with Pantagruel’s first chapter, where “men and women” eat the medlars (138) and suffer the consequences; yet the description of the latter tends to focus on the male body. Conversely, male and female Pygmies, of equally choleric character, are born of Pantagruel’s fart and fizzle (ch. 27, 221): instead of “begetting” a male heir in his image, the giant produces a complete (if grotesque) figure of humanity. See again Tournon’s “Un silence signé Rabelais.” Which, as both Thélème’s outcomes and Pantagruel’s ulterior glosses make clear, we should obviously not mistake for actual (social or political) equality.

454

cornilliat

of, or would dream of, if it could stop laughing: the hidden, immaterial form of an alternate world where Panurge’s faults would no longer monopolize Pantagruel’s love;123 where the relation of man and woman would no longer be blocked by the splitting of its very possibility between a selfish man who thinks about it too much and a loving man who does not think about it at all. In such a world, our heroes might each end up married to a soulmate, as the Thélémites do. But the Thélémites have no names, other than that of the will they are supposed to share; nor do they have any story to tell. In the world of names and stories, conversely, it seems that nothing can persuade Rabelais to invent, for good or for ill, “Panurge’s future wife,” let alone Pantagruel’s—lest he become, like most of his peers, a purveyor of positive or negative illusions;124 lest he become, in other words, Panurge himself. 123

124

See Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: 1994), 104–110, on what it means for Pantagruel to love Panurge “for his own sake.” Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron takes yet another course, by forcing “nouvelles” to accept, thanks to a temporary, equalizing “game,” a fierce dialogue of (noble) men and women (whose definitions of “honor,” contrary to Rabelais’s premise, do not coincide) about the chronically unequal story of man and woman.

chapter 18

Between Laughter and Indignation: Rabelais and Militant Writing Bernd Renner

La peste ne tue que le corps. Mais telz imposteurs empoisonnent les ames. G 45, 123

… Par esbat composant [les mythologies Pantagruelicques] ne pretendois gloire ne louange aulcune: seulement avois esguard et intention par escript donner ce peu de soulaigement que povois es affligez et malades absens, lequel voluntiers, quand besoing est, je fays es presens qui soy aident de mon art et service ql, épître liminaire, 517

… Rabelais s’avance toujours masqué, parce que son langage continue à nous étonner, à nous fasciner.1

∵ Throughout the early modern period militant literature was traditionally linked to polemical attacks and exchanges, illustrated particularly well in the vast production of pamphlets, the most significant ones of which pertain to the religious conflicts that dominated long stretches of the era, notably in France where pent-up religious strife led to a long period of civil wars (1562–1598).2 Even before the dominance of invective and polemics that largely marked that 1 François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: 1972, 1996), 9. 2 See Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525-

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_020

456

renner

bloody period and monopolized the mode of militant writing, at least temporarily, such usually violent and blunt texts had mostly been interesting to historians as their literary value was generally deemed negligible. However, the reevaluation of satire that can be discerned in the critical output of literary scholars of the early modern period over the last two decades has contributed considerably to a more comprehensive definition and understanding of all variants of what falls into the larger category of committed writing, establishing the satirical frame of mind—marked, very generally, by humor and a target of attack—as a unifying characteristic of popular early modern genres as diverse as sotie-plays and Menippean prose, for example, the latter relying increasingly on subtlety and irony in addition to its traditional characteristics of fantasy and the grotesque. This broader conception of the form was largely established in the early modern period and anchors it firmly in the realm of literature.3 Initially at the forefront of any critical assessment of satire until this reevaluation, the conventional exclusive focus on Roman verse satire (satura) and its imitations in Renaissance Europe has been replaced by a broader, more comprehensive approach, turning satire into a critical and often humorous attitude or mode (humanist jocoseria) rather than limiting it to a specific literary genre—satura—, and underscoring its parasitical qualities that enable it to infiltrate all genres. The resulting synthetic quality of satirical ‘mixture’ is probably the major distinctive formal trait of early modern versions of the form, extending its spectrum to the full diversity of committed writing. The seriocomical blend would precisely exclude pure comedic entertainment as vers 1610 (Seyssel: 1990); Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot: 2002); Tatiana Debaggi Baranova, A coup de libelles: Une culture politique au temps des guerres de religion (1562–1598) (Geneva: 2012); Raymond A. Mentzer and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (eds.), A Companion to the Huguenots (bcct) 68 (Leiden: 2016). 3 In addition to the classic studies by Charles Lenient, La satire en France ou la littérature militante au xvie siècle (Paris: 1886) and Olga Trtnik-Rossettini, Les influences anciennes et italiennes sur la satire en France au xvie siècle (Florence: 1958), see above all Pascal Debailly, La Muse indignée: La satire en France au seizième siècle (Paris: 2012); Bernd Renner (ed.), La satire dans tous ses états (Geneva: 2009); Le pamphlet en France au xvie siècle (Cahiers V.L. Saulnier) 1 (Paris: 1983); Rudolf de Smet (ed.), La satire humaniste (Brussels: 1994); Sophie Duval and Marc Martinez, La Satire (littératures française et anglaise) (Paris: 2000); Marc Angenot, La parole polémique: Typologie des discours modernes (Paris: 1982). For Menippean satire, see W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg: 1995); Ingrid A.R. de Smet, Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters (1581–1655) (Geneva: 1996); Howard Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered (Baltimore: 2005). The recent editions of French sotie-plays stress their satirical underpinnings: Olga Anna Duhl (ed.), Sotise à huit personaiges (Geneva: 2005); Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès, Jelle Koopmans, and Katell Lavéant (eds.), Recueil des sotties françaises, t. 1 (Paris: 2014).

between laughter and indignation

457

well as pure invective, as Ruben Quintero underscores in his introduction to the Blackwell Companion to Satire: “The satirist attempts more than visceral laughter or corrosive spite,” echoing another classical, Aristotelian dichotomy, between βωμολοχία (buffoonery) and εἰρωνεία (irony).4 The basic premise inherited from the Latin masters of satura (Lucilius, Persius, Horace, and Juvenal), especially the Horatian synthesis of the useful and the gentle (“utile dulci mixtum”), allowing for telling the truth while laughing (“ridentem dicere verum”), paired with Juvenalian indignation (“facit indignatio versum qualemcumque potest”), as is underlined in their respective first satires, are therefore at the basis of a more general satirical concept that extends from the farcical domain to the pamphlet, two extreme forms that constantly teeter on the threshold of the satirical, integrating the sharp wit of the epigrammatists as well as the very notion of mixture and imagination prominent in the Menippean strain. This is the new brand of satire that embodies, for our intents and purposes, the concept of early modern militant writing, in which an author such as Rabelais will excel.5 At least prior to the Wars of Religion and the aforementioned disproportional rise in straightforward, violent polemic, it is through a number of dichotomies that militant writing in the French Renaissance displays its tensions and complexities while clearly subscribing to the satirical mindset: first and foremost, we observe the fine balance between entertainment and moral edification that is implied in the ridentem dicere verum of classical satura. Secondly, its criticism of the status quo is most often illustrated by the juxtaposition of a deplorable reality and a desirable ideal, or, inversely, its defense of the current situation is conveyed by the depiction of the very real threats menacing the (idealized) status quo (transgressive satire in the former case, conservative satire in the latter, as depicted, respectively, in reformist and catholic writing during the Civil Wars). Thirdly, the targets of its attacks waver between the concrete (ad hominem or specific events) and the universal (an attitude, philosophy, or dogma at the root of the evil to be fought); its rhetoric is often split 4 Ruben Quintero (ed.), A Companion to Satire. Ancient and Modern (Malden: 2007). For satirical laughter, see Debailly, “Le rire satirique,” bhr 56 (1994): 695–717, focusing on the triptych of gratuitous, constructive, and acerbic laughter, and Daniel Ménager, La Renaissance et le rire (Paris: 1995), 176–177, where the critic insists on the constant danger that invective poses for Renaissance satire. For the opposition between buffoonery and irony, see Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Pierre Schoentjes, Poétique de l’ ironie (Paris: 2001), 31–36, and Renner, “‘Qu’un fol enseigne bien un saige’: Folie et ironie dans le Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” L’Année rabelaisienne 1 (2017): 161–181. 5 See Renner, “From Satura to Satyre: François Rabelais and the Renaissance Appropriation of a Genre,” rq 67.2 (2014): 377–424, for a brief overview of the mixture of different genres.

458

renner

between a straightforward, univocal, and therefore presumably more effective didactic approach, on the one hand, and the subtler choice of ambiguity, ambivalence, or polysemy, on the other, usually laced with irony, and placing more responsibility on the active collaboration of the readers, with all the inherent risks of potential misinterpretation. Finally, to conclude this incomplete list, the opposition between historia and fabula, between historical accuracy (a prerequisite for the committed writer’s authority and, consequently, his impact on his public) and esthetic qualities that would enhance the effect of the textual cure, Thomas Nashe’s famous “sugared pills” of satirical medicine, is a main concern of the satiric mode using the possibilities of mixing fact and fiction to its advantage.

1

Militant Writing and Satire: A Brief Overview

In this large view of satire, prose texts occupy a particularly prominent place. Not only does prose satire profit from the rising popularity of Lucian of Samosata’s fantastical tales and serio-comical dialogues that are considered the model of Menippean satire; together with so-called popular satirical theater it also fulfills the criterion of easier accessibility for the target audience. This is a major requirement for a form of writing that strives to have a direct didactic impact on its public, as it aims at healing the ills of society, whether in the constructive Horatian manner, or in the more brutal, destructive fashion inspired by Juvenal. Ever since Michael A. Screech’s fundamental study of Rabelais’s religious satire, the Chinonais’s contribution to militant writing has come into the focus of increasingly thorough critical assessments in the last decades.6 The objective of the present study is to draw on this strong foundation and integrate its results into an attempt to better define Rabelais’s place in this rich tradition of early modern militant writing.

6 Michael A. Screech, L’ Évangélisme de Rabelais: Aspects de la satire religieuse au xvie siècle, (er) 2 (Geneva: 1959). See also Dorothy Coleman, Rabelais: A Critical Study in Prose Fiction (London-New York: 1971); Madeleine Lazard, “La Satire dans le Gargantua,” in La satire au temps de la Renaissance, ed. M.-T. Jones-Davies (Paris: 1986), 81–96; Gérard Defaux, Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophète (Geneva: 1997), 455–515 (“Satire et Allégorie”), 517–559 (“Symbolisme polémique”); Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007); Edwin Duval, “Rabelais and French Renaissance satire,” in A Companion to Satire, 70–85; Nicolas Le Cadet, L’ Évangélisme fictionnel: Les livres rabelaisiens, le Cymbalum mundi, L’Heptaméron (1532–1552) (Paris: 2010); Claude La Charité, “La satire et l’ odyssée des erreurs du xvie siècle,” in Rabelais: Aux confins des mondes possibles. Quart Livre, ed. M. Marrache-Gouraud (Paris: 2011), 65–89.

between laughter and indignation

459

Screech’s sound philological examination of Rabelais’s religious satire lays the groundwork for any student of the subject, identifying meticulously Rabelais’s sources and allusions, especially in Scripture, and touching on essential topics of contention such as free will, divine predestination, grace, the nature of faith, a wide range of abuses of Catholic and papal authority committed by Rome and her representatives. It firmly establishes the satirist’s intermediate position between the extremes of orthodox Catholicism and fanatical proponents of the Reformation. This solid study is firmly grounded in the analysis of historical, concrete satire, however, which is essential groundwork but often neglects esthetic, rhetorical, or abstract concerns that inform Rabelais’s attitude. Gérard Defaux’s take is considerably indebted to this approach that valorizes the author’s sources above all other aspects and aims at decoding the one correct reading of the text, as is Edwin Duval’s, to a lesser extent. While the latter’s work also derives its main justification from the preoccupation with the philologically correct reading, he does not fail to take into account more thoroughly stylistic, poetic, and rhetorical aspects, such as the menippea, coincidentia oppositorum, allegory, or comic inversion. Such preoccupations mark a transition in Rabelais scholarship in general and in the study of satire in particular as they tend to reconcile the opposing critical schools of philology and positivism, on the one hand, and of polysemy, ambiguity, and esthetics, on the other.7 The impact of this issue on the nature and intentionality is fundamental, as it contributes considerably to the juxtaposition between concrete and abstract satire to which I will return later. Dorothy Coleman’s focus on the Menippean qualities of the Rabelaisian prologues provided an early illustration of this critical syncretism, and Duval’s analysis of the Lucianic influence on the Third and Fourth Books, especially their programmatic prologues, leads us in the same direction.8 My own study of the hermeneutics of Rabelaisian satire also attempts to combine philological research and analysis of Rabelais’s satirical “art,” focusing on the evolving ways in which the author conveys corrosiveness and criticism, whereas Nicolas Le Cadet, in a very similar approach, is interested in the corrosive force per se, rather than the stylistic development, of Rabelais’s militant evangelism, enabling our critical concerns to come full circle a half century after Screech’s work and showing the evolution of the scholarly discourse on Rabelaisian satire. This is the basis of my reflections in the following pages, focusing even more on the abstract targets of Rabelais’s militant writing, a territory considerably 7 See the introduction to the present volume. 8 The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 34 (Geneva: 1997); The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 36 (Geneva: 1998).

460

renner

less charted than the conventional analysis of its concrete, historic targets, which are situated mostly in the realm of contemporary religious and political confrontations. The distinction is based on the dichotomy concrete/abstract, which does not correspond to the more common juxtaposition of historical and general satire, nor of playful and punishing satire. Historical satire is usually interested in specific targets of attack, ad hominem or specific events, whereas general satire attacks a vice or a crime instead of a particular perpetrator, corresponding roughly to Du Bellay’s famous definition of satire in the Défense et Illustration de la langue française (1549).9 In the context of the aforementioned dichotomy, the former is usually deemed closer to Juvenalian indignation and polemical discourse, the latter to gentler Horatian scolding, the opposition also being defined as satyra illudens vs. satyra ludens, or pathetic vs. playful satire.10 In my approach, both of these types constitute variants of concrete satire, as they attack targets belonging to a readily discernible extraliterary reality, fighting the mere symptoms of an unhinged world dominated by widespread abuse. Despite the limited critical attention it has garnered, abstract satire, on the other hand, which makes up a major part of the Rabelaisian approach, and indeed constitutes a major contribution of early modern satire in general, endeavors to eradicate the causes of a deplorable situation, the satirist’s ethical obligations being conveyed in a more complex and subtle fashion. At the root of the problem that this type of abstract satire is focused on is the power wielded by the ambiguous main vehicle of all abuse: language itself. Therefore, the Chinonais’s militant writing functions as a defense, illustration, and (potential) remedy of the fundamental disease of linguistic abuse, attempting to heal the extensive catalogue of ills based on and emanating from the harmful influence of language by the beneficial power of language itself, a paradoxical. logocentric approach that owes a considerable debt to ironic texts such as Erasmus’s rhetorical attack on rhetoric in the Praise of Folly. Militant writing, in this general and sweeping context, therefore targets 9

10

Joachim Du Bellay, The Defence and Illustration of the French Language (1549), bk. 2, ch. 4, 71, in Laura Willett, trans., Poetry and Language in 16th-Century France (Toronto: 2003): “The same applies to satires, which the French, for some unknown reason, call cock-andbull stories. I advise you to practice these infrequently, just as I would have you shun slander, unless you write them as the ancients did, in heroic verse […], and under the name of satire, rather than this inept misnomer of cock-and-bull. Moderately criticize the vices of your time and omit the names of the perpetrators.” See Jürgen Brummack, “Zu Begriff und Theorie der Satire,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 45 (1971): 277–375; Renner, “From Satura to Satyre,” 384–395.

between laughter and indignation

461

and problematizes the very act of writing and interpretation in a way that announces Roland Barthes’s chapter on the “Utopia of language” in his Degré zéro de l’ écriture.11 Without subscribing to the polemic statement of the “fascist character” of language, however, as Hélène Merlin-Kajman does in a provocative essay, Rabelaisian satire constitutes an ideal illustration of her analysis of the potential of language, “eternal companion of power,” be it benevolent or malevolent. The critic provides a rather convincing description of the linguistic framework within the confines of which operates early modern abstract satire, not in the least by referring to Geoffroy Tory’s influential Champfleury (1529), a model for Rabelaisian discourse.12

2

Satire and Language: Rabelaisian Complexities

The investigation of the satire of linguistic abuse also endeavors to define more clearly the contribution of militant writing to major questions in early modern and Rabelais scholarship that have neglected this approach so far. I am thinking, on the one hand, of the concept of the Rabelaisian cornucopia illustrating the “uncertainties of language,” even the “scandal of language,” brought to the fore by Terence Cave, and the discussion of linguistic theories at the center of Marie-Luce Demonet’s preoccupations.13 On the other hand, the notions of the “genres d’escrire” and the creation of a “vulgaire illustre,” studied extensively by Mireille Huchon, provide the broader context from which these observations derive,14 taking into account the increasing importance of the vernacular for cultural prestige, translatio studii, and nation-building.

11

12

13

14

See Le degré zéro de l’ ecriture (Paris: 1953, 1972), 62, where the critic insists on the provocation of an “ethics of writing” (“éthique de l’ écriture”) deriving from the transformation of form into conduct, “la forme constituant à elle seule une sorte de mécanisme parasitaire de la fonction intellectuelle,” constituting the basis of a “nouvelle profondeur” of literary creation. Hélène Merlin-Kajman, La langue est-elle fasciste? Langue, pouvoir, enseignement (Paris: 2003), 70–74, in particular Tory’s remark that the Romans had won more victories through language than the lance (ibid., 73). Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text. Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: 1979), 191, 193; Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris, Geneva: 1992). See also Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou’s recent meticulous study, Panurge comme lard en pois: Paradoxe, scandale et propriété dans le Tiers Livre, (er) 53 (Geneva: 2013). Mireille Huchon, “Rabelais et les genres d’ escrire,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 226–247; “Rabelais et le vulgaire

462

renner

This complex and radical approach to the satirical remedy therefore seems the only one allowing for the possibility of a thorough cure by attacking the evil at its root. The abuse of power by religious and political institutions is almost entirely based on the control of knowledge, which in turn is at the mercy of linguistic competence and manipulation. The resistance of the Sorbonne to Bible translations into the vernacular is but one obvious example illustrating this aspect, as it would annul the theologians’ prerogative of biblical exegesis, the basis of their unassailable authority.15 Glossing, interpreting, and comprehending language is the key to power, emancipation, and status. By making this fundamental issue the main target of its criticism, Rabelais’s abstract satire raises the form to a new level and complements the concrete aspects of his relentless attacks in order to achieve a truly universal divina satyra,16 a brilliant synthesis of the aforementioned dichotomies and undoubtedly the first one of such complexity in the vernacular. Such an all-encompassing approach to militant writing, uniting subjectmatter and style, literature and reality, esthetics and ethics, underscores the particular status of satirical writing, its truly intermediate position between fabula and historia, a stance known as argumentum in the anonymous Rhetoric to Herennius, for instance, and which classical thinkers, since Aristotle, identified as the task of the poet (in opposition to the historian), namely to show what could be or should have been.17 Such a demand is tailor-made for the fundamental objective of satire: to heal the ills of society by juxtaposing the ideal and the real, as Friedrich Schiller will famously state in his attempt to define the satirical. The success of this undertaking hinges precisely on the performative power of the verb, the poet’s weapon of choice, an approach which links up with the magical origins of satirical incantations.18 Consequently, the

15

16 17 18

illustre,” in La Langue de Rabelais et la langue de Montaigne. Actes du colloque de Rome, septembre 2003, ed. J. Céard and F. Giacone (er) 48 (Geneva: 2009), 19–39. A fine example is the episode of Gargantua’s strange birth, by his mother’s left ear, which provokes the following comment by the narrator, Alcofrybas, claiming to draw his own conclusions from Scripture and indirectly calling into question the credibility of Churchsanctioned alleged miracles: “Je me doubte que ne croyez asseurement ceste estrange nativité. Si ne le croyez, je ne m’en soucie, mais un homme de bien, un homme de bon sens croit tousjours ce qu’ on luy dict, et ce qu’ il trouve par escript.—Est ce contre nostre loy, notre foy, contre raison, contre la saincte escripture? De ma part je ne trouve rien escript es bibles sainctes, qui soit contre cela” (G 6, 22, cw 20). The variants show the even more radical criticism in earlier editions. For the divina satyra, see Günter Hess, Deutsch-lateinische Narrenzunft (Munich: 1971), 87– 95. Aristotle, Poetics, 51b; Ad Herennium, i, 13. Robert Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton: 1960).

between laughter and indignation

463

abstract, linguistic satire calls into question not only concrete examples of abuse but its own pivotal role in perpetuating the problem. Such a self-reflexive, paradoxical approach, which constitutes a major element of the Rabelaisian telos within the confines of his seriocomical, popular, and erudite chronicles, appears instrumental in raising satire to a more elevated status and to a certain timeless quality, going beyond concrete concerns that the passage of time will render virtually incomprehensible to the reader.19 It is also this abstract quality of the best representative texts of the period’s militant literature—a strategy not limited to Rabelais but possibly most brilliantly implemented by the Chinonais—that lays the groundwork for the success of modern satire, constantly oscillating between the criticism of a deplorable imperfect reality and the attempt to get to the abstract root of the evil in order to approach an ideal. A detailed study of the programmatic prologues to the Rabelaisian chronicles would lead too far in this context, but one of the major focal points that these much-studied chapters have in common is the insistence on the potential, be it beneficial or malevolent, inherent in the mere use of language. In Pantagruel, we are first assured of the comically literal psychological and physical cure provided by the book itself before being threatened in an ironically Lucianesque vein should we remain skeptical of the truthfulness of the narrator’s verb. The complex comments on the problem of interpretation and reception in Gargantua provide endless material for what is probably the most hotly debated chapter in Rabelais scholarship. The Third Book provides a literal and metaphoric wall of sixty-four verbs through which the Cynic Diogenes mirrors and enhances his fellow Corinthians concrete preparations of an expected siege, a frantic activity linked to the narrator’s endeavors by an explicit “Je pareillement” (oc 348; cw 256: I likewise) and the assurance of a bottomless barrel of language at the readers’ disposal. The 1548 prologue to the incomplete Fourth Book insists from the very beginning on the oratorical qualities of the readers’ representative as well as, among other factors, the negative effects deriving from the mere pronunciation of the “horrific names” denoting the targets of Rabelaisian satire (hypocrites, impostors, indulgence-peddlers etc, cw 418). Due to the significantly more problematic political situation and the more stringent censorship and condemnation of his books, Rabelais’s tone in the 1552 dedicatory epistle and prologue to the definitive Fourth Book is more violent, warning readers about willful and malicious misinterpretations of his verb, the

19

Hence the obscurity of most polemical writing of former centuries, especially in the field of the vast pamphlet production accompanying most conflicts.

464

renner

dangers of polemical satire (“vulgaire et Satyricque mocquerie,” oc 524; cw 425), and the benefits of medical cures and mediocritas in action and word. The Brief Declaration, ostensibly a glossary added to explain difficult terms in the Fourth Book, adds to Rabelais’s satire of language as Marie-Luce Demonet has shown.20 The prologue of the Fifth Book, finally, showcases many of the concerns that would be developed more carefully in the two preceding books, but the more explicit binary structure (pitting wisdom against folly, good writers against bad writers, praise and blame) often underscores a more explicit conception of the raw power of the verb.

3

Gargantua’s Education: The Root of All Evil … and of All Hope

For reasons of length I will mostly focus on Gargantua, the Third Book, and the Fourth Book, with occasional glances at Pantagruel, which constitutes, especially in my perspective, a less refined version of Gargantua, as well as at the Fifth Book, which consists overwhelmingly of early drafts that Rabelais apparently chose not to use for his final two chronicles.21 Toward the end, some of the minor writings will also be called upon very briefly, as these texts are usually neglected but help paint a more complete picture of our author’s approach. When it comes to the power of the verb and the synthesis of concrete and abstract satire, a prime example are the fourteen chapters devoted to Gargantua’s education (G 11–24), initially based on, but quickly surpassing a traditional topos of humanist satire illustrated by the antithesis of condemned ‘medieval,’ i.e. scholastic teachings, and modern humanist pedagogical precepts.22 Both models are presented in several stages, the basic opposition being illustrated by the dueling educational programs and the impact of the respective preceptors, a fairly straightforward and traditional satirical approach, at least at first glance. The derided scholastic model, in many ways an extreme caricature of a pedagogical approach that was largely obsolete by the time of the book’s publication, is first described succinctly, relying on the negative attributes and ridiculous names of the preceptors—“un grand docteur sophiste

20 21 22

“Rabelais métalinguiste,” in Le Tiers Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, mars 1996, ed. F. Giacone (er) 37 (1999), 115–128. Huchon, Rabelais grammairien: De l’ histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité, (er) 16 (Geneva: 1981), 412–489. See Rigolot, Langages, 62–76, and Duval, “The Medieval curriculum,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book, 30–44.

between laughter and indignation

465

nommé Thubal Holoferne”; “Aprés en eut un aultre vieux tousseux, nommé maistre Jobelin bridé.” (G 14, 43; cw 38: a great sophist named Master Thubal Holofernes; Afterward he had another old wheezer named Jobelin Bridé.)—as well as on hyperbole concerning the length of the studies, just short of 54 years, with very little to show for. The study of the popular calendar of the Comput, for example, lasts for 16 years and two months. In addition to such blunt criticism, the subtlety of Rabelaisian satire, in the realm of language, is far from absent from these passages. The study of De modis significandi, a grammar treatise heavily criticized by Erasmus, serves as an example: Puis luy leugt De modis significandi avecques les commens de Hurtebize, de Fasquin, de Tropditeulx, de Gualehaul, de Jean le veau, de Billonio, Brelinguandus, et un tas d’aultres, et y fut plus de dix huyt ans et unze moys. Et le sceut si bien que au coupelaud il le rendoit par cueur à revers. Et prouvoit sus ses doigtz à sa mere que de modis significandi non erat scientia. G 14, 43

(cw 38: Then he read him De modis significandi, with the commentaries of Windbucker, Rascal, Too-many-of-‘em, Galahad, John-calf, No ‘count, Vaginatus, and a pile of others; and he was at it over eighteen years and eleven months. And he knew it so well that on a test he could give it by heart [backwards], and he proved to his mother on his fingers that “De modis significandi non erat Scientia [there was no science of the modes of signifying].”) Grounded in the antimodist polemic of nominalist scholastics to which Rabelais refers ironically but which would be too long to discuss here,23 the paragraph showcases some of the major elements of Rabelaisian and early modern satire: the aforementioned comic hyperbole, facetious humor reflected in the names of glossators straight out of the famous St. Victor Library (P 7), ranging from the vulgar (“brelingant” denoting the female sex organ) to the imaginary (“Gualehaul” is a king in the Lancelot en prose-cycle and also an ancestor of Pantagruel’s listed in the genealogy, P 1, 221).24 The mention of “Jean le veau” shows the subtle shift from facetiae to satire, as the attribute not only

23 24

For more details, see Rabelais, oc, 1102, note 18, and Jean Lecointe, L’idéal et la différence (Geneva: 1993), 602–604. See the notes of Huchon in oc, 1101–1102.

466

renner

commonly denotes an imbecile in general but is also increasingly used to ridicule orthodox theologians in particular, both meanings being present in Clément Marot, from whom Rabelais most likely borrowed the term. More germane to the discussion of the brand of abstract satire under consideration in these pages are the last two sentences, however. First, the treatise is presented as nonsensical to the point that one might as well recite it backwards, showing the absurdities of corrupted language. Secondly, and even more importantly, any scientific claims of linguistic signification are being denied, conveniently in authoritative Latin and by using the very title of the treatise that was supposed to support such scientific relevance (“there was no science of the modes of signifying”). This ironic re-appropriation of the title shifts the issue of sense, meaning, and interpretation from the realm of objectivity and unquestionable authority into the more problematic territory of subjectivity and convention, announcing Pantagruel’s unequivocal statement in the midst of the Third Book’s series of consultations: “C’est abus dire que ayons language naturel. Les languaiges sont par institutions arbitraires et convenences des peuples: les voix (comme disent les Dialecticiens) ne signifient naturellement, mais à plaisir” (tl 19, 409; cw 311: It’s a misstatement to say that we have a natural language: languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions of peoples; words as the dialecticians say, signify not by nature but by our pleasure.). Furthermore, Gargantua’s natural genius, praised by his father on the grounds of the invention of the perfect ass-wipe (G 13), is implied in the student’s demonstration to his mother, by the most basic of methods, of the ridiculous nature of the readings and schooling to which he is subjected. Up to a certain point, his natural talents are thus being challenged negatively by the inadequate education that he receives and that thwarts his intellectual and personal development without, however, suppressing them entirely. Even the most basic ‘natural’ methods (“sus ses doigtz”) have more signifying power than such a pompous treatise and are largely sufficient to unmask its deceiving appearances. In addition to the questionable academic quality of this curriculum, the pedagogical methods leave a lot to be desired. The focus is put entirely on mechanical reproduction of unquestionable truths and dogmata. There is no intellectual digestion of knowledge, no exchange or discussion of ideas, no value attached to judgment or critical thinking. The humanist model of education, under the guidance of Ponocrates, will attempt to address all these shortcomings. This encyclopedic new program is not devoid of comic hyperbole either (Gargantua “ne perdoit heure quelconques du jour,” G 23, 65; cw 55: he didn’t waste any hour whatever of the day), however, but it is henceforth at the service of describing an ideal state (not necessarily a feasible one), the prod-

between laughter and indignation

467

uct of a radical satirical cure that is rendered explicit by a medical metaphor at the point of transition between the “two pedagogies”:25 [Ponocrates] supplia un sçavant medicin […]: à ce qu’ il considerast si possible estoit remettre Gargantua en meilleure voye. Lequel le purgea canonicquement avec Elebore de Anticyre, et par ce medicament luy nettoya toute l’alteration et perverse habitude du cerveau. Par ce moyen aussi Ponocrates luy feist oublier tout ce qu’il avoit apris soubz ses antiques precepteurs. G 23, 64

(cw 55: he requested a learned doctor […], to consider whether it was possible to put Gargantua back on a better track; and he purged him canonically with hellebore of Anticyra, and by that medicament scoured out all the alteration and perverse habit of his brain. By that means also Ponocrates had him forget everything he had learned under his former tutors.) The use of hellebore, the common cure of folly, is the final salve in the satirical attack on an obsolete system of education, whose failures are accentuated in this binary approach focused on creating extreme oppositions, rather than a practical solution. Rabelais’s abstract satire of language and rhetoric goes far beyond this fairly simplistic antithetical view of straightforward praise and blame, however. As much as he extols the virtues of the new model, he does not shrink away from painting a much more complex and subtle picture of its potential and risks, rooted mostly in the ambivalent arbitrariness of language, as the interventions of the page Eudemon and the theologian Janotus de Bragmardo illustrate. The former, Ponocrates’s model student, is the reason why Gargantua’s father, Grandgousier, abandons the old model and its sophist instructors. Eudemon’s perfectly structured praise of Gargantua, in flawless Latin, obeys the rules of rhetoric, stressing the importance of gestures, pronunciation, voice, embellishments, and action: … la face ouverte, la bouche vermeille, les yeulx asseurez, et le reguard assis suz Gargantua, avecques modestie juvenile […], [Eudemon] commença le louer et magnifier, premierement de sa vertus et bonnes meurs,

25

Rigolot, Langages, 62–76.

468

renner

secondement de son sçavoir, tiercement de sa noblesse, quartement de sa beaulté corporelle. […] Le tout feut par icelluy proferé avecques gestes tant propres, pronunciation tant distincte, voix tant eloquente, et languaige tant aorné et bien latin […]. G 15, 44–45

(cw 39–40: open face, red mouth, eyes steadfast, and his gaze fixed on Gargantua with youthful modesty, […] began to praise him and exalt him, first for his virtues and good behavior, secondly for his learning, thirdly for his nobility, fourthly for his bodily beauty […]. He set forth all this with such appropriate gestures, such distinct pronunciation, such an eloquent voice, and a speech so richly ornate and truly Latin […].) The young giant’s reaction reveals the shortcomings of his personal and intellectual development: “Mais toute la contenence de Gargantua fut, qu’ il se print à plorer comme une vache, et se cachoit le visaige de son bonnet, et ne fut possible de tirer de luy une parole, non plus q’un pet d’ un asne mort” (G 14, 45; cw 40: Gargantua’s whole reaction was that he started crying like a cow and hid his face in his bonnet, and it was not possible to draw a word out of him any more than a fart from a dead donkey.). This seemingly straightforward satirical antithesis between the products of opposing pedagogical models becomes more problematic if we take into account that Eudemon’s speech describes a Gargantua who was given five years and three months to learn the alphabet, forwards and backwards (G 14, 43; cw 38), who spends most of his time enjoying corporal functions, is hygienically challenged (“Se peignoit du peigne de Almain, c’estoit des quatre doigtz et le poulce,” G 21, 56; cw 49: he combed his hair with Almain’s comb, that was the four fingers and the thumb.), and adverse to study: “Puis estudioit quelque meschante demye heure, les yeulx assis dessus son livre, mais […] son ame estoit en la cuisine” (G 21, 57; cw 50: Then he studied for some paltry half hour, his eyes resting on his book; but […] his soul was in the kitchen.). Ponocrates deems him “fat, niays, et ignorant” (G 21, 56; cw 49: smug, stupid, and ignorant.) at the beginning of his preceptorship. This picture does not correspond in the least to Eudemon’s praise, which allows for a number of readings. Even if Eudemon recognizes Gargantua’s potential, like Grandgousier before him, his “hault sens et merveilleux entendement” (G 14, 42; cw 37: lofty sense and marvelous understanding.), he, at best, praises an ideal that he hopes will be achieved by radically altering the status quo, the deplorable reality of the giant’s sophist education. In this case, Eudemon would

between laughter and indignation

469

occupy the role of satirist himself in his attempt to trigger a cure by confronting perfect style and a less than truthful subject-matter in an intentional rhetorical provocation. Gargantua’s reaction seems to add some weight to this reading. It is this contrast, however, that, paradoxically or even antiperistatically,26 lends another dimension to Rabelais’s abstract satire, as the author refuses to subscribe blindly to the authority of good rhetoric and elegant discourse, even when emanating from model characters. Eudemon’s inadequate description of Gargantua’s reality is a demonstration of the latent risks of linguistic appearances, a trap far more dangerous than the sophists’ obvious lack of rhetorical refinement. Perfect style does not automatically denote truthful content, and it is in this fashion, it seems, that the chapter subtly illustrates Barthes’s aforementioned “ethics of writing”: by putting the emphasis precisely on the undue influence that formal aspects of discourse exercise on our assessment of the subject-matter. Janotus de Bragmardo’s performance will further enhance this argument, as it falls into two distinct sections: the discourse in front of Gargantua and his companions, on the one hand, and the criticism of his colleagues upon his return from his mission, on the other. He is characterized as the most qualified and senior member of the Faculty (which until the definitive edition of 1542 was accompanied by the adjective “theologale,” theologian; one of the many examples of Rabelais’s decision to mitigate the direct attacks on the preferred target of his concrete satire, institutionalized religion). The theologian was sent to the giant to persuade him to return the bells of Notre-Dame, which Gargantua had taken to hang around the neck of his horse. To avoid the risk of “vain glory” (cw 44) deriving from the potential success of his speech, the giant and his entourage had decided to return the bells before Janotus’s discourse, providing further evidence of the ambivalent power of the verb. Nevertheless, the theologian’s intervention is not a mere farcical interlude devoid of anything but its entertainment value but an essential element in Rabelais’s satire of education and language.27 On the most literal level, it provides a counterpoint to 26 27

For the figure of antiperistasis, see Cave, Pré-Histoires: Textes troublés au seuil de la modernité (Geneva: 1999), 35–50. It seems appropriate to slightly nuance Rigolot’s seminal reading of the sequence here, as this episode seems more than a sheer marker of “rupture” between the two educational models. Rabelais’s stylistic amusement, at the root of Rigolot’s interpretation, is also a concrete illustration of the flaws of sophist education and a stronger indictment of its agents, through Janotus’s Janus-faced approach, see infra (Rigolot, Langages, 63–64). Screech, Rabelais, 151–153, hints at the link to the education sequence, as does Defaux, Rabelais agonistes, 385–386, both of whom focus on the concrete historical allusions of the episode; see also B. Bowen’s analysis of the comedy of rhetoric in Janotus’s speech,

470

renner

Eudemon’s perfect discourse due to its utter lack of elegance, its horrendous Latin, and frequent onomatopoetic indications of throat clearing. Once again, form and style do not tell the whole story, however. On this literal level, Master Janotus also puts into perspective the performances and roles of the Faculty’s student body (“l’escolier limousin,” P vi) and its graduates (Gargantua’s first preceptors). Beyond the largely material motivation for his mission—Janotus insists on the bells’ material importance for the Church and his own gain in case of a successful speech28—it is the evolution and varietas of the style and rhetoric of his performance that are most interesting in our context. Apart from the beginning (“Ce ne seroyt que bon que nous rendissiez noz cloches. Car elles nous font bien besoing,” G 19, 51; cw 44: It would only be fair that you should return our bells to us, for we need them badly.) and the explanation of his own remuneration, the speech seems almost willfully obscure, which is likely meant to mask its lack of substance behind the prestigious veil of seemingly erudite language. As is so often the case in Rabelais, natural and artificial incarnations of speech and language are juxtaposed for maximum effect to expose the root problem that the author’s militant attitude seeks to address. The power of the verb resides in its mere appearance here, aimed at a public that would be easy to impress by the semblance of academic discourse. As Gargantua and his companions do not react, as they are clearly not the gullible target audience that he had hoped for, Janotus attempts to bribe his ‘difficult’ audience by promising free indulgences29 and finally presents the ultimate proof:

28

29

“Janotus de Bragmardo in the Limelight (Gargantua 19),” French Review, 72.2 (1998): 229– 237. See the bells’ function in keeping the peasants in check thanks to their magical qualities— expressed in awful latinized French meant to impress an uneducated audience—, first and foremost “la substantificque qualité de la complexion elementaire, que est intronificquée en la terresterité de leur nature quidditative pour extraneizer les halotz et le turbines suz nos vignes, vrayement non pas nostres, mais d’ icy auprés. Car si nous perdons le piot nous perdons tout et sens et loy” (G 19, 51; cw 44–45: the substantific quality of the elementary disposition that is enthronificated, in the terresterity of their quidditative nature to extraneize the hot blasting mists and the whirlwinds from over our vines—not really ours, but close by here, for if we lose the piot, we lose everything, both sense and law.). And his own motivation: “Si vous nous les rendez à ma requeste, je y guaigneray six pans de saulcices, et une bonne paire de chausses, que me feront grant bien à mes jambes, ou ilz ne me tiendront pas promesse” (ibid.; If you return them to us at my request, I’ll get out of it six strings of sausages and a good pair of hose that will do my legs much good, unless they don’t keep their promise.). “Vultis etiam pardonos? per diem uos habebitis, et nihil poyabitis” (G 19, 52; cw 45: By God, you shall have pardons and not pay a cent.).

between laughter and indignation

471

Çà je vous prouve que me les doibvez bailler. Ego sic argumentor. Omnis clocha clochabilis in clocherio clochando clochans clochatiuo clochare facit clochabiliter clochantes. Parisius habet clochas. Ergo gluc. Ha, ha, ha. C’est parlé cela. Il est in tertio prime en Darii ou ailleurs. Par mon ame, j’ay veu le temps que je faisois diables de arguer. Mais de present, je ne fais plus que resver. Et ne me fault plus dorenavant, que bon vin, bon lict, le dos au feu, le ventre à table, et escuelle bien profonde. G 19, 52

(cw 45: I’m proving to you that you must give them to me. Ego sic argumentor (I adduce proof of this thus): Omnis clocha clochabilis in clocherio clochando clochans clochatiuo clochare facit clochabiliter clochantes. Parisius habet clochas. Ergo gluc. Ha ha, ha ha, now that’s talking! It’s in tertio prime, in Darii or elsewhere. ‘Pon my soul, I’ve seen the time when I was a devil in argument, but now I don’t do anything but prattle anymore, and all I need from now on is good wine, good bed, back to the fire, belly to the table, and a plenty deep ladle.) The obvious objective of self-satirization via what has been called the “domestic witness” or the rhetoric of the prosopopoeia is undeniable but what is remarkable is the division between the simple and efficient discourse that Janotus prefers to defend his personal interests and the comically inadequate obscurity when it comes to developing the noble, ‘spiritual’ arguments, which should constitute the decisive part of the speech. Whether it is due to naïveté, incompetence, sheer laziness, or the conscious attempt to mask spiritual vacuity in order to preserve material gains and worldly power, style and language are at the basis of the abuse that Rabelais unmasks in these chapters on education. This dialectical construct is further enhanced by one more facet of Janotus’s intervention: his indignation towards his fellow theologians who deny his compensation upon his return to the faculty of theology. Strikingly, no mention is made of the fact that the old sophist’s contribution to the recovery of the bells was literally nullified beforehand by Gargantua’s preceding decision to return the bells, an argument that could have justified the refusal. Instead, the compensation offered by the giant is used to withhold Janotus’s loot: “Car peremptoirement luy feurent deniez, par autant qu’ il les avoit eu de Gargantua selon les informations sur ce faictes” (G 20, 54; cw 47: for they were peremptorily denied him, inasmuch as he had got them from Gargantua, according to the information reported on this.). This curious argumentation seems to indicate not only the willingness to avoid any financial commitment by any means possible, but also the stubborn and premeditated refusal to acknowl-

472

renner

edge the incompetence and ineffectiveness of one of their own, which would cast themselves and their institution in a less than favorable light. Janotus’s reaction raises the stakes of the satirical attack on the theologians: Raison? […]. Nous n’en usons poinct ceans. Traistres malheureux vous ne valez rien. La terre ne porte gens plus meschans que vous estes. Je le sçay bien: ne clochez pas devant les boyteux. J’ai exercé la meschanceté avecques vous. Par la ratte Dieu, je advertiray le Roy des enormes abus que sont forgez ceans, et par voz mains et menéez. Et que je soye ladre s’ il ne vous faict tous vifz brusler comme bougres, traistres, hereticques, et seducteurs, ennemys de dieu et de vertus. G 20, 54–55

(cw 47–48: Reason! […], we use none of that in here. Miserable traitors, you’re good for nothing; the earth does not bear any people wickeder than you, I know full well [: don’t limp in front of the lame. I’ve committed mean acts together with you]. By God’s spleen! I’ll inform the king of the enormous abuses that are fabricated in here by your own doing and by your own hands, and may I be a leper if he doesn’t have you all burned alive as buggers, traitors, heretics, and seducers, enemies of God and of virtue!) In the light of such lucidity, Janotus’s incompetence acquires a more complex and problematic status, even beyond the juxtaposition of his fairly coherent reasoning with regard to his material concerns and the ludicrous over-the-top performance masking spiritual vacuity. This tripartite structure of his speech (material vs. spiritual in front of Gargantua; unveiled and frank self-accusation in front of his colleagues) turns him from an incompetent and lazy sophist, maybe even a natural fool, into a corrupt perpetrator of intentional abuse, an artificial and therefore contemptible fool. His folly is thus transformed from a contemptible vice into an outright crime.30 Far beyond the traditional satirical attacks on corrupt and incompetent theologians, this final mise-en-scène of the domestic witness illustrates the transition to a more credible satire via a shift form the criticism of Janotus’s public

30

For the dichotomy natural/artificial fool, see Duhl, Folie et rhétorique dans la sottie (Geneva: 1994) as well as Erasmus, Praise of Folly; for the transition of folly from vice to crime, one of the pivotal changes that the notion undergoes in the 16th century, see Brummack, “Zu Begriff und Theorie der Satire”: 313–316.

between laughter and indignation

473

performance to an unfiltered insider’s view marked by the rhetoric of parrhesia tinged with cynicism.31 In this triptych, the straightforward and even naïve wording of Janotus’s material concerns alternates with the willfully obscure and ultimately utterly ridiculous theological argumentation and ends up giving way to the brutal and menacing honesty of the final act; all three stages of this performance are closely linked to linguistic mastery, however, which far outweighs subject-matter. Such a dissociation of form and subject-matter helps avoid the simple antitheses that are the focus of conventional satire, particularly of the historical or concrete vein. In general, this long episode centered on broad pedagogical concerns is not only a master class of an abstract satire aiming to educate and to convince but also an illustration of the theoretical precepts of the famous prologue of Gargantua promoting critical thinking and independent judgment at the service of the “perfectissime” interpretation (8) that is the pride and joy of the diligent, emancipated reader. It is this type of reader, precisely, who would recognize the three acts of Janotus’s performance and draw appropriate conclusions, assuring the vitality and effectiveness of Rabelaisian satire. The combination of the literal and the hidden meanings of the episode, mostly represented by Janotus and Eudemon, is responsible for the force of the attack, as Alcofrybas insists in the prologue: “Et posé le cas qu’au sens literal vous trouvez matieres assez joyeuses et bien correspondentes au nom, toutesfois pas demourer là ne fault, comme au chant des Sirenes: ains à plus hault sens interpreter ce que par adventure cuidiez dict en gayeté de cueur” (oc 6; cw 4: And, even in case in the literal sense you find these matters rather jolly and corresponding to the name, you should not stop there, as the Sirens’ song, but interpret in a higher sense what peradventure you thought was said casually). The focus on interpretation underscores the intrinsic ambiguity, even volatility, of language and thus the necessity of a well-formed reader able to identify linguistic abuse and manipulation, mostly through informed readings. It also shows the central position of language in the struggle for power, as the ecclesiastical resistance to Bible translations into the vernacular shows so emphatically, a concrete example being Luther’s dismantling of the indulgences (which Janotus offers for free in exchange for his loot …). It is this abstract quality of Rabelaisian satire in conjunction with the diligence of his readers that is responsible for a good part of its continuous ‘practical’ appeal, as the Chinonais had foreseen in the prologue of the Tiers Livre: “Autant que vous en tireray par la dille, autant en entonneray

31

See Michel Foucault, Le courage de la verité: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres ii (Paris: 2009).

474

renner

par le bondon. Ainsi demeurera le tonneau inexpuisible” (oc 351; cw 259: As much as I draw from the spigot, I’ll funnel in through the bung. Thus will the barrel remain inexhaustible.).

4

The Tiers Livre: Rhetoric over Action

The aforementioned precepts and developments are illustrated in the most accomplished and uncompromising fashion in the third instalment of the series (1546). While the concrete contexts, querelle des femmes, misogyny, criticism of certain (pseudo-)scientific fields of knowledge and the legal system, have been at the center of scholarly interests, the satirical framework focusing even more radically on the role of language and rhetoric has often been neglected yet again.32 The entire book is completely under the spell of the power of the logos, the “sayings” outweighing by far the “deeds” in the famous dichotomy featured henceforth in the full title of books three and four (“Heroic Deeds and Sayings of the good Pantagruel”). While Panurge’s paradoxical praise of green sauce and debts (tl 2–5) seems to mark the transition between the trickster’s facetious use of language and a more serious satire adapted to a more problematic social, political, and religious climate, these ambivalent chapters do indeed also, or even predominantly, function as a warning against and a dismantling of the absolute power of rhetoric, as many signs indicate: from the dubious authorities on which Panurge bases his demonstration, frequent targets of Rabelaisian satire (“University and Parlement of Paris,” tl 2, 358; cw 265),33 to Pantagruel’s prolonged and unusual silence during the speech and his ultimate dismissal of the persuasive power of abusive, albeit pleasing, rhetoric: “J’ entends […] et me semblez bon topicqueur et affecté à vostre cause. Mais preschez et patrocinez d’ icy à la Pentecoste, en fin vous serez esbahy, comment rien ne me aurez persuadé, et par vostre beau parler, jà ne me ferez entrer en debtes” (tl 5, 367; cw 273: I understand […] and you seem to me a good advocate and devoted to your cause. But preach and plead from now to Whitsunday, in the end you’ll be dumb32

33

Some notable exceptions, without touching on the issue of abstract satire as defined here, however, are Coleman, Rabelais: A Critical Study in Prose Fiction; Marie-Luce Demonet, Les voix du signe; André Tournon, “En sens agile”: Les acrobaties de l’esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: 1995); Oumelbanine Zhiri, L’ extase et ses paradoxes: Essai sur la structure narrative du Tiers Livre (Paris: 1999); Stéphan Geonget, La notion de perplexité à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2006). This endorsement is hardly innocuous as these are precisely the institutions that, beginning in 1542, started to turn the screws of censorship ever more tightly on Rabelais’s first two chronicles; see Screech, Rabelais (London: 1979), 207–211.

between laughter and indignation

475

founded at how you won’t have persuaded me one bit, and by your fancy talk you’ll never make me go into debt.). It is noteworthy that Pantagruel uses two verbs, preach and plead, that denote the main targets of Rabelaisian satire, religious and legal authorities, Panurge’s alleged models for the speech. The giant stresses the continuing entertainment value of his companion’s speech but mourns the loss of the main objective of rhetoric, the power to persuade. Barring willful manipulation on Panurge’s part, i.e. a paradoxical praise designed to fail in order to be bailed out, the trickster’s status seems to shift gradually from ironist to buffoon, from a wily manipulator of Neoplatonic patterns of discourse to expose the hypocrisy of the powerful to an amusing, yet ambiguous sidekick that incarnates the flaws to be denounced. Panurge’s extensive gratitude for Pantagruel’s generosity absolving him of his debts reinforces the ambiguity of his status (tl 5, 368; cw 274): is he grateful that his ulterior motive—a satire of rhetoric—has been recognized and completed by his master, or is he truly out of touch and a mere recipient of satire from this moment on? Be that as it may, the apparent failure of his abusive rhetoric underscores the caution one should exercise in dealing with such linguistic fireworks.34 We encounter the same ambivalence that informed the speeches of Eudemon and Janotus. The series of consultations that follows displays a similar problematic. Judging on Pantagruel’s initial comments (tl 10, 379–380: “N’ estez vous asceuré de vostre vouloir? Le poinct principal y gist: tout le reste est fortuit, et dependent des fatales dispositions du Ciel.” cw 422: Aren’t you certain of your will? The main point lies there: all the rest is fortuitous and dependent on the fated dispositions of heaven.), Panurge’s problem cannot be solved by any outside authority. There is no certain method of predicting his matrimonial future. Personal responsibility and initiative are the only way to proceed, the answer must come from self-knowledge not from blindly following authoritative voices. The giant’s consent to undertake the consultations must therefore have reasons other than the search for a concrete solution to his sidekick’s dilemma. It also far exceeds any criticism of pseudo-scientific fields such as astrology or of charlatans such as the judge Bridoye. Interestingly enough, the only concrete decision—the resolution to consult the Oracle of the Divine Bottle—results from the final consultation, of the fool Triboullet, a consultation which follows directly the acknowledgement of the perplexities of human judgment via an anecdote told by the giant. The series of consultations comes full circle here, as 34

For a detailed discussion of this strategy and the satirical implications of this episode, see Renner, “Provocation et perplexité: Le double éloge paradoxal des dettes et de la rhétorique (Tiers Livre ii à v),” er 50 (2010): 46–65, and the extensive bibliography in the annotations.

476

renner

the initial condemnation of a coincidental judgment by dice (tl 11) following the very first outside authority, Homeric and Virgilian lots (tl 10), is partially revoked in the face of human incompetence and corruption or, alternatively, of a dilemma unresolvable by human reason.35 Yet again, Pantagruel himself makes this point, once more completing the circle of knowledge that he had thrown open with the aforementioned initial comments. He does not defend Bridoye’s innocence but rather excuses his error for three reasons: old age, simplicity, and the overwhelming number of equitable decisions pronounced by the judge throughout his career (cw 43, 388–389). Since 2309 of over 4000 sentences were taken to appeals court and all of them were upheld until that moment, the judge’s method of mechanical recitation of the letter of the law without comprehension of its spirit or figurative meaning seems to reflect the shortcomings of the judicial system on the whole, and of the appeals court in particular, as much as his own.36 Rabelais’s militant attitude illustrates, throughout the Third Book, the essential precept of the prologue to Gargantua, namely the demand that diligent readers weigh carefully what they read, allowing for the malleability of language and rhetoric at the basis of all power.37 In all his naiveté, Bridoye illustrates the danger of this absolute and arbitrary power one last time, in the relatable context of judicial authority. Human folly, in Bridoye’s and especially in Triboullet’s case, is seen in an ambiguous and highly malleable light, oscillating between divine wisdom and diabolical temptation, before the unilateral 35

36

37

tl 44, 489: “seulement par sort estre en anxieté et doubte des humains manifestée la volunté divine” (cw 391: only by chance, in human anxiety and doubt, is the divine will manifested.). Even more damaging is the biting irony and preterition by which the Court of Myrelingues is judged, as it hears the case against the foolish judge Bridoye: “Je ne vouldrois penser ne dire, aussi certes ne croy je, tant anomale estre l’iniquité, et corruptele tant evidente de ceulx qui de droict respondent en icelluy parlement Myrelinguois en Myrelingues, que pirement ne seroit un procés decidé par ject des dez, advint ce que pourroit, qu’ il est passant par leurs mains pleines de sang et de perverse affection” (ibid.: I would not want to think or say, nor indeed do I believe, that the all too evident iniquity and corruption of those responsible for justice in this Myrelinguais Parlement in Myrelingues is so extraordinary that a lawsuit could not be decided worse than by casting dice, come what might, than it is now, passing through their hands full of blood and perverse inclination.). See the two classic studies on the episode: J.M.D. Derrett, “Rabelais’s Legal Learning and the Trial of Bridoye,” bhr 25 (1963): 111–171; Screech, “The Legal Comedy of Rabelais in the Trial of Bridoye in the ‘Tiers Livre’ de Pantagruel,” er 5 (1964): 175–195. “Car vous mesmes dictes, que l’ habit ne faict poinct le moine […]. C’est pourquoy fault ouvrir le livre: et soigneusement peser ce que y est deduict” (G, prol., 6; cw 4: for you say yourselves that the robe does not make the monk […]. That is why you must open the book and carefully consider what is expounded in it.).

between laughter and indignation

477

condemnation of folly, imposing itself a few decades later, which Michel Foucault retraces in his seminal study.38 It is far superior to erudite advice, notably in cases where human knowledge is of no use; hence Pantagruel’s justification of Bridoye’s and endorsement of Triboullet’s irrational, natural authority. So it is not exaggerated to discern Pantagruel’s triumph39 in the decision to undertake the voyage to the Divine Bottle on the suggestion of the fool, the trip itself being a voyage of self-exploration for Panurge and also the other members of the party, but it seems that the situation is even more complicated than that. One should not forget that the giant himself undergoes an apprenticeship, not only manifest in the errors in some his own interpretations of the different consultations,40 but also, even more so, in the evolution of his exegetic endeavors. Whereas his readings are usually just as univocal as Panurge’s, although often more convincing, the attitude changes at the end of the series as the giant finally accounts for the inherent paradoxical nature of the undertaking and of language itself, which results in his attempts to reconcile seemingly mutually exclusive phenomena, beginning with the interpretation of Trouillogan’s famous advice for resolving Panurge’s matrimonial dilemma, “neither one nor the other and both together,” advice that ingeniously results from the philosophical banquet and what A. Tournon calls “fragments of an accredited discourse”:41 I interpret […] having and not having a wife in this way: that having a wife is having her for such use as Nature created her for, which is for the aid, pleasure, and society of man; not having a wife is not getting slack by hanging about her, not contaminating for her sake that unique and supreme affection that man naturally owes to God, not giving up the duties he naturally owes to his country, the commonwealth, his friends, not disregarding his studies and business to be continually making up to his wife. Taking in this way having and note having a wife, I see no incompatibility or contradiction in the terms tl 35, 463; cw 364

38

39 40 41

Foucault, L’ histoire de la folie à l’ âge classique (Paris: 1972). This tendency is established as early as tl 1, 262, when the narrator, citing Hesiod, insists on “the good daemons (call them if you will angels or genii) as mediators between gods and men.” See the final chapter intitled “Le triomphe de Pantagruel” in Zhiri, L’extase, 223–247. See Lance K. Donaldson-Evans, “Panurge perplexus: Ambiguity and relativity in the Tiers Livre,” er 15 (1980): 77–96. Tournon, “En sens agile”, 81–97.

478

renner

Pantagruel’s reading, capping a series of syncretic interpretations of Trouillogan’s enigmatic advice, shows his own maturing, his own path towards mediocritas in this epic of exegesis meant to incite the diligent readers to engage in their own interpretative efforts.42 It is not the concrete exegesis per se that counts but rather the effort to resolve the perplexity caused by the advice by means of an exemplary but not authoritative coincidentia oppositorum. The giant’s maturation process culminates in the defense of judge Bridoye that turns into an implicit accusation of the judicial system. ‘Pantagruel’s triumph’ is therefore as much about Panurge’s inability to replace words with action on his journey toward self-knowledge as it is about his master’s own capacity to see both sides of the coin and to weigh carefully what he reads, fulfilling thus the precept of the prologue to Gargantua.43 Militant writing in general and satire in particular take a turn toward heightened subtleness and increasing complexity in this epic of rhetoric that fulfills the promise of independent thinking voiced forcefully in the prologue to Gargantua. Consequently, the voices of all official authorities, even beyond the satirized theological, political, or scholarly institutions, need to undergo critical assessment by the diligent reader, including those of the narrator and of the humanist prince. This is where Panurge functions both as an agent and a target of the satire,44 as was insinuated above. The manipulation of language is at the root of the abuse that Rabelaisian satire is attempting to “cure” and the Third Book is the ultimate illustration of this struggle. This ambivalent magic of language is demonstrated all throughout this text, not in the least in the two framing episodes, the praise of debts and of the Pantagruelion, where language transforms questionable behavior, in the first instance, and a banal plant in the second into fictional chimeras that test the diligent readers’ exegetic capacities within a complex ironic framework that illustrates the ever increasing influence of Lucian and cynicism on Rabelais’s writing,45 not in the least via the pronounced 42 43

44

45

For the notion of the tl as an epic, see Duval, “The Judge Bridoye, Pantagruelism, and the Unity of Rabelais’ Tiers Livre,” er 17 (1983): 37–60, and Zhiri, L’extase, 232. One should also consider their staunchly univocal interpretations of all the consultations up to the final ones as mutual attempts at unmasking the malleability of language. Not only Pantagruel “play[s] the fool” to “impress upon his vassal the importance of ‘worldly wisdom’,” as Duval underlines (The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, 110), Panurge, despite his shortcomings, acts as a provocateur in his own right, systematically taking a stance opposing Pantagruel’s; see Renner, “Provocation et perplexité,” and “‘Qu’un fol enseigne bien un saige’ ”: 161–181. As Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion (Cambridge, Eng.: 1990), 199, observes: “Panurge comes into his own in the Tiers Livre as a voice of deviance and satire.” This influence is most obvious in the programmatic prologues to the Third and Fourth

between laughter and indignation

479

dialogic form of the text and the fruitful satirical combination of comedy and philosophical dialogue (spoudaiogeloion) that Lucian claims to have invented in the Prometheus Es, a trademark Menippean mixture.46

5

Le Quart Livre: Irony and Ambiguity

In the light of the Gallican crisis, one could expect the Fourth Book to break new ground in its militant orientation, especially veering toward polemical criticism and thereby anticipating the turn much satirical writing would take in the last third of the century. Rabelais’s dedicatory letter addressed to the Cardinal de Chastillon seems to confirm this tendency. The Chinonais defends himself against the “atrocious and irrational” accusations of alleged “heresy” in his books, condemning “certain cannibals, misanthropes, agelastes” and their habit of “interpreting perversely and against all use of reason and ordinary language” (cw 423). Again, the problematic abuse of malleable language and less than diligent exegesis surfaces as the major target of Rabelais’s criticism and are combined with his solicitation of the powerful cardinal’s protection against such calumniators. Rabelais reacts specifically to attacks from both sides of the religious divide, especially against polemical criticism from Guillaume Postel, Gabriel Dupuyherbault, and Jean Calvin.47 It is also significant that the polemical tone of the 1548 prologue to the partial Fourth Book was transferred into this epistle, this old prologue being the only chapter in the four authentic books that was entirely rewritten instead of merely amended or modified in the definitive 1552 version of the Fourth Book. The violent reactions of the religious adversaries might have contributed to the Chinonais’s ire but he was prudent and ingenious enough to combine the most outrageous attacks on the ecclesiastical authorities with a rhetorical deftness and linguistic mastery that enhanced the ambiguity of his assaults. The brilliant mixture of irony and

46 47

Books, as Duval has shown (The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, 15–28, 223–227, and The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, 49–63). For Lucian’s influence, see above all Marcel Tetel, “Rabelais et Lucien: De deux rhétoriques,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book, 127–138; Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagnière, Lucien de Samosate et le lucianisme en France: Athéisme et polémique (Geneva: 1988); Romain Menini, Rabelais altérateur: “Græciser en françois” (Paris: 2014), 141–561; and the contributions of Jean Lecointe, Bernd Renner, and Dominique Bertrand in Rire et Dialogue, eds. M. Briand, S. Dubel, A. Eissen (La Licorne) 126 (Rennes: 2017), 81–128. Lucian, “To One who said ‘You’re a Prometheus in words’,” in Works, vol. vi, ed. K. Kilburn (Cambridge, MA, London: 1959), 417–427. See especially Screech, Rabelais, 314–315, 323–326.

480

renner

indignation lead to a (paradoxical) ‘mitigated parrhesia’ that transforms the Fourth Book into the summum of early modern militant writing. The impact of the Gallican crisis and the widening divide between Catholics and Protestants that will lead to the outbreak of the Wars of religion some ten years later is undeniable, of course, but as we have seen in the preceding books, Rabelais is not willing to confine his satire to concrete, historical circumstances, even though the situation prior to the publication of the Fourth Book seems more dire than ever. His satire therefore appears more biting, but he is nonetheless keen on having it surpass the narrow confines of actuality. Rabelais is clearly more interested in combatting the root of evil, not simply its visible symptoms. In this perspective, the continuation of the dialogic structure in large parts of the Fourth Book further facilitates the exchange and discussion of opinions. Lucian’s impact seems even more pronounced in this more complete satirical mixture, extending from the Third Book’s trademark combination of the philosophical dialogue and comedy to other aspects of Lucianic satire, such as the pronounced veil of the grotesque, mostly visible in the fantastic sea voyage and its monstrous encounters, reminiscent, above all, of the Greek cynic’s best-known text, A True Story. It seems moot, therefore, to try and distinguish clearly between Rabelais’s historical targets and his more general concerns, a variation of the famous debate triggered by opposing readings of the prologue to Gargantua: his satire subscribes to both attitudes and this ambivalence is far from diminishing its impact while guaranteeing its longevity. Not only does the existence of a historical target of the satire not exclude its applicability to other, more general contexts that the carefully weighing diligent reader might identify, such concrete criticism is often used to hint at a larger problem, not confined to the specific illustration at hand.48 Connotation outweighs denotation in this respect, which, according to Paul Ricœur, constitutes the essence of literature, ambiguity thus altering the referential function of the linguistic sign.49 The new prologue confirms these tendencies and inaugurates what will be the consecration of Rabelaisian satire, a synthesis of multiple satirical traditions that mutually nourish and enhance each other. The text, yet again inspired by Lucian, reacts to the attacks from both sides of the religious spec48

49

Again, most attention to satire in Rabelais, and the ql in particular, has focused on its concrete targets; see the sources in the preceding note as well as La Charité, “La satire et l’ odyssée des erreurs du xvie siècle,” Renner, “Difficile est,” 273–294, 325–345, and “From Satura to Satyre,” 409–417. Paul Ricœur, La métaphore vive (Paris: 1975), 273–282.

between laughter and indignation

481

trum by a plea in favor of mediocritas, especially in the extensive Couillatris episode, which also ridicules human concerns from a divine perspective, but also in comments on the famous dispute between Ramus and Galland or on the fear of “tomber en ceste vulgaire et Satyrique mocquerie” (oc 524; cw 425). This warning is explained in the Brief declaration as follows: “Comme est des antiques Satyrographes Lucillius, Horatius, Persius, Juvenalis. C’ est une maniere de mesdire de chascun à Plaisir, et blasonner les vices: Ainsi qu’ on faict es jeux de la Bazoche par personnaiges desguisez en Satyres” (bd 704; cw 594: as is that of the ancient satirists Lucilius, Horace, Persius, Juvenal. It’s a way to speak ill of each and every one at will, and to blazon [expose] vices, as is done at the revels of the Basoche, by characters disguised as Satyrs.). The conflation of several satirical traditions—Greek Satyr-play, Roman satura, and late medieval sotie-plays—confirms not only the aforementioned synthetic tendencies of early modern satire but also Rabelais’s prudence and Erasmian irony while he composes his most daring satire.50 Of course he presents here his most radical satire, but polysemy, irony, and allegory outweigh the mode’s ‘vulgar’ tendencies, and the carefully weighing reader will be the ultimate judge of its impact. We are here in the realm of mock praise and blame, a widely used satirical mode that Rabelais integrates frequently into his chronicles, notably at the beginning and the end of the Third Book (praise of green sauce and debts; praise of the Pantagruelion).51 Undeniably, Lucianic fantasy and irony will dominate this new Rabelaisian mix, however, and reference to the Greek cynic is conspicuously absent from this gloss in the Brief declaration. By officially condemning invective and polemical satire, to which the Latin masters listed and the references to blunt satyrs and popular theater appear to reduce the militant mode, Rabelais dons a veil of protective irony, which grants him the liberty to not only be a more subtle satirist but also to valorize the Menippean tendencies that characterize early modern satire, the theme of the fantastic voyage alone owing a great debt to Lucian.52 50

51

52

Consider Erasmus’s comment on not writing satire after virulent attacks on Catholic clergy in The Praise of Folly, ed. R.M. Adams (New York: 1989), 73: “But it’s no part of my present business to arraign the lives of popes and priests, lest I seem to be composing a satire rather than an encomium; and I don’t want anyone to suppose I’m casting blame on good princes when I praise bad ones.” See Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: 1966) and Annette Tomarken, The Smile of Truth: The French Satirical Eulogy and its Antecedents (Princeton: 1990). The blunter satire of the Fifth Book, drafts that Rabelais composed before or at the same time as the tl and ql, might also be targeted indirectly here and would justify implicitly

482

renner

This more nuanced view is reflected in the depiction of farce in the episodes of the sheep merchant Dindenault and of the Chicanous, early in the Fourth Book, episodes under the auspices of Panurge, who is being held partially responsible. While the deadly violence of these farces is new in the Rabelaisian versions of this genre of popular theater, it is not in farce per se.53 These chapters seem to constitute the illustration of the “vulgaire et Satyrique mocquerie,” as the negative comments of Pantagruel, Epistemon, and Friar John show quite clearly: “Tu (dist frere Jan) te damne comme un vieil diable” (ql 8, 556; cw 454: You […] are damning yourself like an old devil.); “Ceste narration, dist Pantagruel, sembleroit joyeuse, ne feust que davant nos œilz fault la craincte de Dieu continuellement avoir.—Meilleure, dist Epistemon, seroit, si la pluie de ces jeunes guanteletz feust sus le gras Prieur tombée” (ql 16, 576; cw 472: This story […] would seem merry, were it not that we must continually have the fear of God before our eyes.—Better, it would have been […] if the downpour of those young gauntlets had fallen on the fat prior.). The criticism, tellingly avoiding the subject of the violence, paves the way for a more effective, and in many ways more radical farce, which will be integrated into the Menippean universe as the text progresses.54 The proliferation and malleability of the linguistic sign remains at the heart of this abstract satire in the Fourth Book, from Panurge’s complaints and illogical announcement of his testament during the storm, the three lists of verbal monstrosities that make up Quaresmeprenant (ql 30–32), to the linguistic dismantling of the “monstrous physeter”55 before arriving at the pinnacle of Rabelaisian satire starting with the Chitterling episode. The comical war against this sausage people has strong underpinnings of religious satire, of course, but cannot be reduced to this concrete target. It is a blueprint for Menippean mixture and its trademark ambiguity, which is best illustrated in Pantagruel’s purely linguistic contribution to the battle: he snaps “the Chitterlings over his knee” (cw 526; ql 41, 634: rompre les Andouilles au genou), which

53 54

55

why he chose not to publish these episodes that are in many respects rough drafts of what would become the ql. See Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: 2002). This is where one has to nuance the reading of E. Bruce Hayes, Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais (Farnham: 2010), who locates the most radical version of the farce in these fairly conventional chapters and leaves out what seem more convincing illustrations of his otherwise valid thesis in the later episodes (from Quaresmeprenant to messere Gaster). Pantagruel’s pun on Perseus and “Persé jus par moy sera” (ql 33, 616; cw 508: pierced and on his back) illustrates the prominent status of performative language characteristic of the ql’s abstract satire.

between laughter and indignation

483

denotes not only an impossible undertaking but is also formed after the idiom “snap the eels (‘anguilles’) over one’s knee.” This linguistic ruse symbolizes the confusion between lent (eels) and carnival (sausages), between the Chitterlings and their archenemy Quaresmeprenant (the sausage people had mistaken Pantagruel for their adversary; hence their attack), and, more importantly, between rigid Catholic orthodoxy and fanatic Protestantism.56 Moreover, the Chitterling sausages illustrate the farcical element in all its variety, as they are the incarnation of stuffed food, combining therefore the culinary and literary connotations of the term and integrating the form more thoroughly into the satiric universe. The excuse of the queen of these female phallic warriors, Niphleseth (Hebrew for the male member as the Brief declaration explains, illustrating yet another case of ambivalence), underscores once more the problematic status of farcical satire and of its integration into the Menippean realm: “En Andouilles plus toust l’on trouvoit merde que fiel” (ql 42, 636; cw 528–529: in Chitterlings was found rather shit than gall.). Hence also the loss of the nutritional function, dead Chitterlings are buried, in opposition to the model of the episode in the anonymous Disciple de Pantagruel (1538), where the Pantagruelists used the sausages to replenish their provisions. The episode on the island of the Papimaniacs further develops these strategies. The supremacy of the collected papal glosses, the Decretals, over the Bible (illustrating the role of the pope, ‘deus in terris,’ who has taken God’s place) is criticized in straightforward fashion by the Pantagruelists, who tell anecdotes of these commentaries’ harmful effects, anecdotes that are consistently misinterpreted by the fanatic bishop Homenaz as miracles worked by these “sacrosanct and eternal” texts (ql 51–52).57 It is the bishop himself who betrays the secular concerns of the Papimaniacs and the tyrannical intolerance against all dissenting voices in a harangue that contrasts with Diogenes’ aforementioned list of seemingly gratuitous contributions to the defense of Corinth in the prologue of the Third Book; here is the fanatic bishop’s take: Encore ces diables Hæreticques ne les [Decretales] voulent aprendre et sçavoir. Bruslez, tenaillez, cisaillez, noyez, pendez, empallez, espaultrez,

56

57

See Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkley: 1990), for a reading of the central episodes of the ql, from Quaresmeprenant to the Andouilles, ch. 29–42. See also Smith and Cornilliat in this volume. See also their literally harmful effect on Pantagruel when the giant touched the book, which provoked “temptation vehemente en son esprit de battre un sergent ou deux, pourvu qu’ ilz n’eussent tonsure” (ql 49, 652; cw 543: an urgent temptation in his spirit to beat a sergeant or two, provided they were not tonsured.).

484

renner

demembrez, exenterez, decouppez, fricassez, grislez, transonnez, crucifiez, bouillez, escarbouillez, escartelez, debezillez, dehinguandez, carbonnadez ces meschans Hæreticques Decretalifuges, Decretalicides, pires que homicides, pires que parricides, Decretalictones du Diable. Vous aultres gens de bien si voulez estre dictz et reputez vrays Christians, je vous supplie à joinctes mains ne croire aultre chose, aultre chose ne penser, ne dire, ne entreprendre, ne faire, fors seulement ce que contiennent nos sacres Decretales et leurs corollaires. ql 53, 663

(cw 552: Besides, these heretic devils will not learn and know them. Burn them, tear them with pincers, cut with shears, drown, hang, impale, break their shoulders, disembowel, chop to bits, fricassee, grill, slice up, crucify, boil, crush, quarter, smash to bits, unhinge, charcoal-broil these wicked heretics, decretalifuges, decretalicides, worse than homicides, worse than parricides, decretalictones of the devil. Now you worthy people, if you want to be called and reputed true Christians, I beseech you with clasped hands not to believe anything else, not to think anything else, not to say, undertake, or do anything, except what is contained in our holy Decretals and their commentaries.) Verbal copia is inherently ambivalent, as Erasmus, for instance, had underscored in the De duplici copia rerum et verborum, and Rabelais never ceases to warn against this danger. Those two lists are representative of the satire of linguistic malleability that constitutes a main factor of Rabelaisian hermeneutics, the narrator’s description of Diogenes’ ridiculing of warlike efforts contrasting with Homenaz’s belligerent rhetoric at the service of absolute and indisputable tyrannical power. Language functions usually as the agent and as the target of satire in these episodes. The subtle ambivalence is often in the detail, for example when Homenaz confuses Decretists, respected judicial experts on Gratian’s Decretum, with laughable Decretalists, who replace Scripture with the decrees of their ‘deus in terris,’ the pope. Epistemon is quick to pick up on this “juicy slip” of the tongue that reveals the Papimaniacs’ hypocrisy (ql 53, 663; cw 553).58 The linguistic finesse is also reflected in the ongoing project of integrating multiple variations of satire into the Menippean mixture, specifically of the far-

58

For this central episode, see especially Marichal, “Quart Livre. Commentaires,”er 5 (1964): 100–133, and Screech, Rabelais, 401–410.

between laughter and indignation

485

cical or even facetious variant. It is during the banquet that Homenaz launches into a ridiculous hyperbolic praise of the Decretals, which causes Epistemon to suffer from diarrhea: “Faulte de selle persée me constrainct d’ icy partir. Ceste farce me a desbondé le boyau cullier” (ql 51, 657; cw 547: The lack of a closestool forces me to get out of here. This stuffing has unstopped my bumgut.). The play on the culinary, theatrical, and satirical implications of the ‘farce’ further develops the observations from the Chitterling episode and ends up integrating this satiric variant more firmly into a wider perspective, especially when the creator of this gut-turning farce,59 Homenaz, ends up being at the receiving end of the ironic denouement of the episode via Pantagruel’s tongue-in-cheek comment on the Papimaniacs’ parting gift of pears. The giant calls them “good Christian pears” in a parody of the Papimaniacs’ numerous shortcomings, using an Italian expression for “simpleton,” while at the same time taking a jab at what ‘official’ Christianity unfortunately looks like at this moment in time. Screech rightfully distinguishes here between the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity, the former being at the center of Rabelais’s attacks, while the author remains faithful to the principles of the latter.60 Despite the Fourth Book being the most openly aggressive in its satire, especially at an increasingly problematic moment in time, we see such examples of ambivalence and irony, the aforementioned ‘mitigated parrhesia,’ that call for thorough reader involvement in the interpretative process, following the hermeneutic precepts from the famous programmatic prologue to Gargantua in a complex fashion. The final episodes under consideration from the Fourth Book are also the consecration and radicalization of the function of the linguistic sign that is at the center of the book’s abstract satire: the frozen words and messere Gaster. If languages are arbitrary and conventional, as Pantagruel remarks in the Third Book (tl 19, 409; cw 311), the frozen words further reduce the linguistic unit to the phoneme, in a more serious fashion than the monks’ ridiculous chants had done during the attack of the Abbey of Seuillé (G 27, 78; cw 66). Thawing and unthawing illustrate both the danger of imposed, rigid meanings and the liberty to overthrow such linguistic tyranny. The incomprehensible frozen words trigger Panurge’s panic, a customary reaction in the Fourth Book, which is usually countered by Frère Jean’s mocking or Pantagruel’s common sense. In this case the trickster’s repeated lamentations and instigations to escape are met 59

60

Most farce and sotie-plays, especially the latter often performed by clerks, are thus far from the simplistic, popular form of entertainment that is often associated with these genres; see the extensive introduction in M. Bouhaïk-Gironès, J. Koopmans, K. Lavéant, Recueil des sotties françaises, v. 1 (Paris: 2014), as well as Koopmans’s contribution to this volume. Screech, L’ Évangélisme de Rabelais, 77.

486

renner

with Pantagruel’s rational exhortation to identify the source of the noises and an array of possible figurative meanings drawing on Petronius, Aristotle, Plato, or the myth of Orpheus (ql 55). In the following chapter, these erudite interpretations are confronted with the pilot’s literal explanation of words and sounds from a winter battle thawing in the spring. Despite Panurge’s approval of this reassuring literal version (“Par dieu […] je l’en croy,” ql 56, 669; cw 558), the different meanings are not hierarchized and merely offer interpretative possibilities with coexisting levels of exegesis, underscoring again and again the recurring ambivalence in Rabelaisian hermeneutics that the prologue of Gargantua had established in exemplary fashion. The idiom “parler en l’ air” (from St. Paul, iCorinthians) with which Pantagruel had first indicated the appearance of the frozen words is yet another one in the list of expressions which combine literal and figurative meanings (see the aforementioned “rompre les Andouilles au genou,” the “poires de bons Christians,” or the “motz de gueule” in the present episode, which designate the initially incomprehensible frozen words as daring, frank, and often witty repartees) in an effort to illustrate the power and intrinsic ambivalence of the logos.61 Hence Pantagruel’s refusal to conserve the frozen words, i.e. to ‘fix’ their meaning, a process that is at the root of the tyranny of official language used and abused by ecclesiastical and political authorities to cement their hold on absolute power (see for example the widespread resistance emanating from the Church of Rome against vernacular translations of the Scriptures). This problematic is more than ever at the forefront of the satire, especially in the Fourth Book, where, less playfully than in the previous books,62 it functions as a tool of another remarkable coincidentia oppositorum: a violent polemical satire coinciding with an abstract divina satyra full of ambivalence, ambiguity, and irony that does not diminish the didactic effect of the lessons that satire endeavors to get across. Yet again, we encounter a ‘mitigated parrhesia’ that turns Rabelais’s text into the model of a complete satire. The episode of messere Gaster (ql 57–62) reinforces these observations by adding fresh perspectives to the satirical mix. The ambiguous status of the giant allegorical stomach, between relentless tyrant, who demands unconditional obedience, and “premier maistre es ars du monde” (ql 57, 671; cw 560), whose inventions potentially put an end to famine and war (ql 61–62), seamlessly 61 62

See Paul J. Smith, Voyage et écriture, (er) 19 (Geneva: 1987), 13. For the “motz de gueule,” see oc, p. 1573, note 4 for p. 669. Screech’s designation of “humanist comedy” shows the difficulty of defining the domain of satire, especially in the first books (Rabelais, 1–14); see also Demerson, Humanisme et facétie: Quinze études sur Rabelais (Orléans: 1994).

between laughter and indignation

487

cements the ambivalent framework of the text, reinforcing the domain of paradoxical praise and offering a parody of the temple of virtue and of the mythical paradise on earth (ql 57, 671; cw 560).63 On the one hand, Gaster’s apparent altruism, illustrated by his inventions and pedagogical activities, is particularly problematized by the recurring refrain “et tout pour la trippe” (ql 57, 673; cw 561–562: And all for the gut.). On the other hand, he seems quite aware of his modest status, as he confesses “estre non Dieu, mais paouvre, vile, chetifve creature” (ql 60, 681; cw 573: he was no god, but a poor, vile, puny creature.). More clearly than in the Papimaniac episode, the criticism is here directed toward the source of idolatry, i.e. the earthly “divinity’s” disciples, whose blind devotion is at the root of their respective masters’ absolute powers: Ilz tous tenoient Gaster pour leur grand Dieu: le adoroient comme Dieu: luy sacrifioient comme à leur Dieu omnipotens: ne recongnoissoient aultre Dieu que luy: le servoient, aymoient sus toutes choses, honoroient comme leur Dieu. ql 58, 675

(cw 563: They all held Gaster as their great god, worshiped him as a god, sacrificed to him as to their omnipotent god, recognized no other god than him, served him, loved him above all things, honored him as their god.) Gaster himself, however, refers to them as “Matagotz” (hypocrite flatterers) and degrades them as he sends them “à sa scelle persée veoir, considerer, philosopher, et contempler quelle divinité ilz trouvoient en sa matiere fecale” (60, 682; cw 573: to his close-stool to see, consider, philosophize, and contemplate what divinity they found in his fecal matter.). Pantagruel’s anger at these idolaters confirms Gaster’s verdict and at the same time links the episode to the Chitterling War and the Papimaniacs, where the giant reacted in similar fashion. This major triptych of Rabelaisian religious satire shows the direction of his criticism. Epistemon is quick to mitigate his master’s anger as he asks him to “veoir l’issue de ceste farce” (ql 60, 679; cw 569: to see the outcome of this farce.). The same ambivalent, culinary-theatrical “farce” that had made him leave the banquet table in Papimania, now seems worth considering. We also remark that the banquet dishes offered by the idolaters have regained the 63

In addition to the comments by Marichal and Screech, see Cave, “Transformations d’un topos utopique: Gaster et le rocher de vertu,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin (er) 21 (1988), 319–325. For Persius’ influence, see oc, notes to pp. 672–673.

488

renner

appetizing qualities from comparable lists in the first two books,64 even the previously inedible warlike chitterlings are henceforth equipped with a savory “armor” of fine mustard (ql 59, 677; cw 565). In light of these observations, one can claim that Rabelais’s divina satyra reaches its peak near the end of the final authentic book, welcoming several satiric traditions more fully into its fold than before,65 including the previously criticized farce. In this perspective, Pantagruel’s refusal to resolve certain problems completes the challenge of authority, even including the case of the benevolent perfect humanist prince (ql 64). Panurge’s self-defecation in the last chapter underscores, for its part, the problematic status of the trickster, counterweight to official authority. No individual, no institution will henceforth benefit from unquestioned authority, satire has reached its most universal and at the same time most radical and most transgressive status.

6

Other Writings

It would certainly be tempting to extend this analysis to other texts in the Rabelaisian universe, especially his Prognostications and Almanacs, fertile ground for satire, the corpus of the Fifth Book (1562–1564), or even pseudoRabelaisian texts such as the apocryphal Fifth Book from 1549, a fascinating case of plagiarism that has lately been seen as a satirical attack against Rabelais.66 Spatial constraints will limit me to a few succinct remarks. The two rewritings of the Pantagruéline Prognostication (1533, then 1542 and 1553) during Rabelais’s lifetime show, for instance, how the original concrete satire gives way to more general concerns as the historical circumstances change.67 The general objectives of the satire are present from the start, however, as the pamphlet, drawing on Scripture, opens with a violent dismissal of abusive prognostications that

64

65

66 67

See Rigolot, Langages, 155–157. See Duval, “La messe, la cène, et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire, 131–141, for the satire of the mass and the Eucharist. See my introduction to La satire dans tous ses états, 7–22, “From Satura to Satyre,” 380– 389, 409–412, and “La fin du Quart Livre. Apogée du meslange satiricque,” in Rabelais et l’ hybridité des récits rabelaisiens, eds. D. Desrosiers, Cl. La Charité, Ch. Veilleux, T. Vigliano, (er) 56 (Geneva: 2017), 311–324. Huchon, Rabelais (Paris: 2011), 327–330; see also Abel Lefranc, “Un prétendu ve livre de Rabelais,” rér 1 (1903): 29–54, 122–142. Rabelais, Pantagruéline Prognostication pour l’ an 1533, ed. M. Screech (Geneva: 1974), vii. See also Screech, Rabelais, 104–124. See also Tom Conley’s contribution to the present volume.

between laughter and indignation

489

were widespread at the time: “tu destruyras tous ceulx qui disent mensonges, ce n’est legier peché de mentir à son escient et abuser le pauvre monde curieux de sçavoir choses nouvelles” (pp 923; cw 747: “Thou shalt destroy all who speak lies.” It is no slight sin to lie consciously and mislead the poor public, anxious to learn new things.). Historical and universal criticism go hand in hand in this violent prologue “Au liseur benivole” under the auspices of a truthful narrator.68 In the vein of Sebastian Brant’s and Erasmus’s seminal works, the satire refers specifically to the popular subject of folly that governs a perverted world: “La plus grande folie du monde est penser qu’il y ayt des astres pour les Roys, Papes, et gros seigneurs, plustost que pour les pauvres, et souffreteux” (pp 5, 928; cw 751: The greatest madness in the world is to think that there are stars for kings, popes, great lords, rather than for the poor and needy.).69 Parts of this outspokenness announce the polemical pamphlets that would dominate satirical discourse during the Civil Wars. Similar conclusions could be drawn from the Fifth Book. The drafts from Rabelais’s hand, as far as commonly accepted scholarship indicates,70 extend most likely from the late 1530s to the early 1550s. This timeframe also seems to be reflected in the nature of the Fifth Book’s satire. The early episodes of the “Isle sonnante” (cl 1–8) or of the “Chats-fourrez” (cl 11–15) are violent and straightforward satires of the Catholic Church and of the judiciary, topics that are treated with much ambiguity and irony in the Fourth Book as we have seen. Later episodes (“Quinte-essence,” cl 17–24; “Isle d’ Odes,” 25; “Pays de Satin,” 29– 30) seem more prone to allegory and ambiguity, a process culminating in the syncretic, even enigmatic episodes of the “païs de Lanternois” and of the “Dive Bouteille” (cl 31–47). The nature of the satire might be useful in providing further hints at authorship or time of composition in these cases,71 as especially the early chapters’ basic premises and framework appear in vastly modified 68

69 70

71

“Vous asseurant que je n’en dy sinon ce que j’ en pense: et n’en pense sinon ce que en est: et n’en est aultre chose pour toute verité que ce qu’en lirez à ceste heure” (pp, 924; cw 748: [Assuring you that I don’t say] about it except what I think, and think nothing about it except what is so, and there’s nothing else to say about it for the whole truth except what you will read about it right now.). See Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven: 1991), 139. Huchon, Rabelais grammairien, 412–489, her Notice in oc, 1595–1607, Giacone (ed.), Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998 (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), and Gérard Milhe Poutingon’s contribution to this Companion. See Demonet, “L’essence du Quint Livre” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, 227–241, and Renner, “ ‘Par craincte de (re)tomber en ceste vulgaire et satyrique mocquerie’: Structures satiriques des Tiers, Quart et Cinquième Livres,” in Inextinguible Rabelais. Actes du Colloque de Paris-Sorbonne (Novembre 2014) (Paris: forthcoming).

490

renner

form in the Third Book and the Fourth Book. Fabula and argumentum retain the upper hand over historia in the authentic books of the Pantagrueline Chronicles, which is reflected above all in the comic ingenuity, the serio ludere, and the biting irony that characterize their satire.

7

Conclusion

Satire is at the heart of the Rabelaisian enterprise, the underlying pedagogy of the utile dulci mixtum is omnipresent and conjugated in all aspects of its endless variety between the poles of Horatian gentleness and Juvenalian indignation. The refinement of Rabelais’s art is visible in the evolution of his satire, illustrating the birth of a modern conception of the satiric mode that combines various classical and medieval influences, accentuates the impact of irony and ambiguity, and shifts the focus toward the emancipated readers’ collaboration in the interpretative process, thus assuring his satire’s lasting impact, its timelessness. Rabelais’s text therefore functions as a hub between satire’s narrowly generic tradition, more or less limited to Roman satura, and the Menippean mixture of various influences, modes, and techniques that will characterize these modern incarnations of an increasingly important and at the same time increasingly problematic intellectual exercise. This is not to say that Rabelais did not have concrete objectives in mind for his satirical criticism but rather that he was far from limiting the impact of his satire to his auctorial intentions, as he forcefully claimed in the famous prologue to Gargantua. Satire thus constitutes one major key to a better understanding of an œuvre that is still holding many secrets and whose lessons appear more than ever applicable to our times.

chapter 19

Rabelaisian Humor John Parkin

Humor, like beauty, defies absolute definition, and that is because of its intrinsic subjectivity.1 One who fails to condone Rabelaisian obscenity will deny the humor that others draw from it—witness my students’ occasional revulsion at the walls of Paris episode in Pantagruel 15—and one who rejects the black humor initiated within the cruel slaying of the sheep traders in Quart Livre 8 will similarly preempt any comic effect. Hence when Barbara Bowen asks, “Are there any motifs or objects universally accepted as comic?” she responds, truly enough, that “over two thousand years of earnest discussion have not produced a universally acceptable theory.”2 As ultimately “insondable et insaisissable,”3 laughter, humor and comedy nevertheless invite theoretical approaches, although these must remain tentative: for Floyd Gray, Rabelaisian laughter is “destructeur,”4 while for Mikhail Bakhtin it is by nature creative and regenerative, satirical humor being alien to the Rabelaisian spirit as to the popular culture that he enshrined.5 Both assertions are partial. If Rabelais is not satirizing ultramontanism in the Papimanes episode of the Quart Livre, one wonders what its point is. Conversely, it is hard to discern any destructive element within the gaiety predominant among the voyagers throughout that same volume: may one not in fact read Panurge’s exclamation at the start of Quart Livre 23 as emblematic of their entire mood: “Ha, ha […] tout va bien” (593; “Aha! […] all’s well”: cw 487)? Admittedly, collective glee of this kind, sustained among a group of friends, “banquetans, gringnotans, divisans et faisans beaulx et cours discours” (ql 55, 667; “banqueting, nibbling, conversing and making fine short discourses”: cw 556), is joyful rather than mirthful,6 and thus more an atmosphere conducive to humor than humor per se, though a sympathetic attitude of bonhomie on the

1 See Colette Quesnel, Mourir de rire d’après et avec Rabelais (Montreal: 1991), 11: “le rire est subjectif et soumis à des séries de contraintes individuelles, sociales ou relevant du savoir.” 2 Barbara C. Bowen, Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Nashville-London: 1998), 7. 3 Floyd Gray, Rabelais et le comique du discontinu (Paris: 1994), 7. 4 Ibid. 5 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: 1985), 51. 6 See Michael Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: 1997), 308.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_021

492

parkin

part of the reader might well seem essential to a comic author’s success; witness Rabelais’s repeated attempts in his prologues to engender that mood within his narratee. We may resent being incongruously addressed as “goutteux tresprecieux,” but the intention to regard us as “bonnes gens” (tl, prol., 345; “most precious poxies; good folk”: cw 253) must help to redeem the insult. Moreover, if goodwill is indeed an important constituent to the humor process, incongruity is for many, myself included, a yet more vital ingredient, though still not definitive; and fundamental among the incongruities of the Rabelaisian text is the inexplicable, perhaps even preposterous, relationship generated between Pantagruel and Panurge. The love which binds the humanist prince to his companion, “lequel il ayma toute sa vie” (P 9, 246; “whom he loved all his life”: cw 163), may emerge from a dichotomy within Rabelais’s own personality, but within his text it remains, unlike, say, the relationships linking Prince Hal to Falstaff or Quixote to Sancho, an incongruity unresolved. Just as there is no reason for Pantagruel to accept Panurge into his entourage after the latter’s linguistic tour de force in Pantagruel 9, so there is no reason to suppose that he shuns him at the conclusion of Quart Livre 67 when, with clothing covered in shit following yet another spasm of terror, the man defies reality, disavows his panic attack, claims that the fecal mess is Irish saffron and, crucially perhaps, invites his companions to drink: “Sela. Beuvons” (701; “Sela! Let’s drink up!” cw 592). At this point if not always one responds to Panurge as one chooses, hence when scholars insist that that response be negative, witness Michael Screech who anchors him here “in squalor and error,”7 nay Jeanneret (et tu, Michel?) for whom he is “moralement irrécupérable,” devoid of “toute dignité humaine,”8 they are demanding more of us than is justified. If we (like Pantagruel) can accept the cold-blooded murder of Dindenault, we can surely (again like Pantagruel)9 extend our indulgence towards the antiheroic but all too human plight that Panurge is here bent on merrily denying. Thus, when Milan Kundera declares that, “it is at the peak of Panurge’s braggadocio that we love him most,”10 he too is begging the question, but at the same time signaling our free-

7 8 9 10

Screech, Laughter, 305. Michel Jeanneret, Le défi des signes: Rabelais et la crise de l’interprétation à la Renaissance (Orléans: 1994), 189. See Paul J. Smith, Voyage et écriture: Etude sur le Quart livre de Rabelais, (er) 19 (Geneva: 1987), 60, on the redemptive implications of his response at this point. Milan Kundera, “The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh,” in Testaments Betrayed, trans. L. Asher (London: 1993), 3–33 (7).

493

rabelaisian humor

dom to celebrate rather than condemn the ways in which, like any comic hero, he defies and inverts the norms of respectable conduct.11 A value-based approach to Panurge remains, nevertheless, fully legitimate, being signaled by Frère Jean (of all people) when he quotes Romans 12:9 at the conclusion to the Dindenault episode, or by Pantagruel at the end of the storm sequence when he proposes forgiveness for the man’s anxiety provided he joined the collective struggle to save the ship, which of course was not the case. However, to reduce the entire text to a moral condemnation of one character, compelling as he might be, is to lessen its comic potential too drastically. Rabelais’s satire, which, pace Bakhtin, remains a vital element in his comic repertoire, operates far more broadly than that.12

∵ To begin with, one can cite the obvious agenda of Christian Humanism which derives from the Erasmian tradition. This is a satire based on the values of an enlightenment situated in classical learning and evangelical devotion as praised in the letter Pantagruel receives from his father in Pantagruel 8, and, given its extensive treatment over sixty-plus years of Rabelais scholarship, it need scarcely be revisited. Its targets are obvious, including the medieval legists attacked during Pantagruel’s education, the scholastic tutors of Gargantua, the ridiculous Sorbonnard Janotus de Bragmardo, the tyrant Picrochole, defier of irenic humanism, the idolatrous Papimanes, a threat to Gallican religious independence, and the similarly fetishist stomach-worshipping Gastrolatres in whom scholars have rightly discerned a nuancing of the Rabelaisian carnivalesque.13 To this extent Rabelais is indeed, pace Gray, “un écrivain engagé,”14 but if modern readers may find that engagement too remote from their own mindset, Rabelais’s techniques of caricature still do much to amuse on their own terms, generating a series of incongruities which, like for instance Homenaz’s fatuous eulogies of the Decretals, are too obvious to require detailed analysis here. Moreover, the value-based satire is doubled by a separate pattern less fully

11 12 13 14

For a general treatment of such figures, though perhaps light in its consideration of Rabelais, see Robert Torrance, The Comic Hero (London: 1978). See for instance the measured criticisms of Bakhtin offered in this context by Pascal Debailly La Muse indignée: La satire en France au seizième siècle (Paris: 2012), 145–147. See Screech, Rabelais (London: 1979), 447–448, Jeanneret, Le défi des signes, 161, and Daniel Ménager, La Renaissance et le rire (Paris: 1995), 168. Gray, Rabelais et le comique, 108.

494

parkin

treated by critics and which depends more on identities than principles. There are in Rabelais many figures and groups who are targeted for what they are as much as for what they do or have done, and here the satire has a different purpose, namely to reassure one in one’s nature rather than to prosecute a value one intends one’s listeners to share. Examples of this clan-based satire can be found in Gargantua’s joke at the expense of his father’s grown-up guests in Gargantua 12, his (provincial?) narrator’s attack on the Parisians at the start of chapter 17, Panurge’s mocking of the Turks in Pantagruel 14, the humiliation of the grandees described by Epistémon after his sojourn in Hell (in Pantagruel 30), and, for me at least, the anti-feminist material accompanying the death of Gargamelle (“bien peu me soucie ny d’ elle ny d’aultre”: G 37, 102; “mighty little I care about her or anybody else”: cw 86), Panurge’s discomfiting of the Parisian lady (P 21–22), and the description of female psychophysiology developed by Rondibilis in Tiers Livre 32. The point of such episodes is scarcely to teach a lesson: are the bakers of Lerné guilty of anything more than unneighborliness and foul language when they confront the opposing clan of Seuillé shepherds and spark off the Picrocholine War, and are these qualities anything more than the normal accompaniments of inter-parochial rivalry?15 The aim is rather to use any incongruity (Islamic temperance, Parisian stupidity, the pride of the powerful, pmt, or the selfishness of the fouaciers) as a pretext for a mockery which reaffirms the confidence of the mocking clan, though the strategies do carry risks. Can that pretext not be seen as irrelevant or insubstantial, since not all the inhabitants of Leucece are as inane as those who pursue Gargantua through the streets, and do the Saintongeais sheep-traders truly merit death for the quite normal practice of greedy haggling? Frère Jean certainly nudges the reader’s conscience by closing the episode with a quotation from Romans 13:10 (viz. “Mihi vindictam”: ql 8, 556), and one sufficient perhaps to make Christian readers reluctant if not unable to join the clan busy assailing their victims, just as feminist readers have long resented the shameful punishment imposed by Panurge on his coy mistress. Judge it as one might, that incident exemplifies a further element in this particular satiric mode, namely the scapegoating of an individual victim reduced to a clan of one member. Examples alongside the aforementioned haulte dame (also Parisian of course) are the escholier limousin (P 6) whose doggerel one might in other circumstances have quite enjoyed, the discomfiting, in Gargan15

See Robert Muchembled, La Violence au village (Brussels: 1989), 56: “Les altercations entre bergers ou entre gardiens d’ animaux […] recouvrent des oppositions collectives indéracinables et expriment des haines intenses contre des populations voisines et concurrentes.”

rabelaisian humor

495

tua 49, of the defeated Picrochole at the hands of a peasant clan of Chinonais millers, and, to be sure, the frequent targeting of Panurge which forms a dominant pattern in the Tiers Livre and a frequent one in the next volume up to and including its final scene. The pharmakos will forever be good for a laugh, and Panurge’s pig-headedness, cowardice, and self-love form useful pretexts for his victimization, though his ultimate identity remains within the clan of Pantagruélistes into which, despite his moral failings, he is forever reintegrated. Panurge’s role and nature, examined fully by Myriam Marrache-Gouraud,16 will never be exhaustively defined, but he belongs in major part if not entirely to the tradition of the comic anti-hero whose ever more outrageous antics of debauchery, theft, trickery, violence, and improvidence appeal in how they invert normal values and allow us temporary relief from the demands of the super-ego, and the incongruities intrinsic to this figure are too obvious to require enumeration. However, the multiple failings of Panurge, like Frère Jean’s bluster and vulgarity, or the philistinism of the Amiennais monk as recounted by Epistémon in Quart Livre 11, will in the end pall on readers, if indeed they find them acceptable to begin with. Everyone’s tolerance has its limits, but that of Pantagruel remains remarkably broad, providing a signal to the reader, and it is significant that, perhaps like all such characters, Rabelais’s anti-heroes in the end betray a nucleus of positive qualities which we may use to redeem them. Frère Jean is, clearly enough, a brave fighter and a good companion, and Panurge a loyal enough Pantagruéliste, compelled to accompany his lord “voire allast il à tous les Diables” (tl 28, 439; “even were he to go to all the devils”: cw 340) and that to the point of even leading their post-prandial tributes to God in Quart Livre 65: is he here in thrall to the devil?17 So, in the end moralement récupérable, albeit partially and by association, Panurge still provides an important challenge to the agenda that Rabelais is pursuing seriously around him. A good example is the confrontation with Thaumaste where he does everything a scholar should not do prior to an academic contest, yet still wins out to the greater glory of his master (who in this instance has done nothing to enhance that glory) and the admiration of his erstwhile opponent (with whom he then proceeds to enjoy a monumental booze-up). At that point as so often elsewhere, Panurge is travestying real life, but doing so in full awareness, witness how he spares Pantagruel the effort of preparing for the disputation and counts on his own ability to improvise on the 16 17

See her “Hors toute intimidation”: Panurge ou la parole singulière, (er) 41 (Geneva: 2003). Contrast Jerry Nash, “Further Reflections on the Character Portrayal of Panurge as the Devil,” in A French Forum: Mélanges de la littérature française offerts à Raymond C. et Virginie A. La Charité, eds. G. Defaux and J. Nash (Paris: 2000), 77–85 (85).

496

parkin

day: “Seigneur laissez toutes ces pensées et vous allez coucher […] car de matin je respondray et argueray contre monsieur l’Angloys” (P 18, 284; “My Lord, give up all these thoughts and go to bed […] for tomorrow I’ll reply to Mister Englishman”: cw 196). However, another type of figure may also parody the patterns of mature and conscientious living, namely the naive rather than knavish clown, and whose appeal is pleasing rather than tempting.

∵ The infant Gargantua is one instance, his childhood behavior being that of any dirty little urchin as yet uninitiated to the adult world, but also untouched by its moral strictures:18 “comme les petitz enfans du pays […] se vaultroit par les fanges, se mascaroyt le nez, se chauffouroit le visaige”, etc. (G 11, 33; “like the little children of the region […] wallowing in the mud, getting his nose dirty, messing up his face”: cw 30). Otherwise, a simpleton at the point of himself achieving fatherhood, the man is endearing in his emotional confusion over the coincident death of Badebec—“ne sçavoit que dire ny que faire” (P 3, 225; “he didn’t know what to say or do”: cw 143)—and at a point when the apparatus of scholasticism (“argumens sophisticques” pursued in modo et figura) is no help. However, the humanist satire, for me at this juncture incidentally rather than significantly evoked,19 is drowned out by his paternal joy at the newborn, again a beguiling rather than offensive reaction. Other instances of naive parody, whereby a character’s reactions are incongruous because of his inadequacy, are the pilgrims encountered during the Picrocholine war, stupid in being so gullible but redeemed by their honest admiration of Grandgousier (G 45), the inept and aged Janotus, again an emblem of scholastic degeneracy but favourable in his own self-awareness (“Par mon ame, j’ay veu le temps que je faisois diables de arguer. Mais de present je ne fais plus que resver”: G 19, 52; “Pon my soul, I’ve seen the time when I was a devil in argument, but now I don’t do anything but prattle any more”: cw 45), the timorous peasant found cowering in the holy-water stoup on the isle des Papefigues but whose ingeniously daring wife will in due course save him from the devil’s claws (ql 47), not to mention Panurge throughout the Tiers Livre, given that his pathetic wavering over the marriage question may be

18 19

See Jeanneret, Le défi des signes, 168. Gérard Defaux, Rabelais et les sophistes Contribution à l’histoire de l’humanisme chrétien au xvie siècle (The Hague: 1973), 51 ff. develops an alternative line which is arguably oversophisticated.

rabelaisian humor

497

given a moral gloss (is he not guilty of philautia to the point of being dangerously mad?),20 but can also be seen as a merely human failing. Has indecision not afflicted all of us at some point in our lives, not least at the approach of nuptials? On the other hand, as knavish parody cloys when our conscience kicks in, so naive parody stalls when it simply becomes tedious: thus, Gargantua does fortunately outgrow his childish practices, and should not Panurge, the superannuated adolescent, simply forget his misgivings and take the plunge? Were Rabelais, however, merely content to roll out these different patterns in linear fashion while creating his comic effects and crises, his humor would risk being predictable and monotonous. One need scarcely remark how rarely that is the case, a point dependent particularly on the way in which he mixes the comic modes. His erudite satire, for example, has sometimes been read as straying over into those set-pieces of Humanist rhetoric which seem more obviously to be its value-based justification, Pantagruel 8 being an example. Gray, naming Gerard Brault,21 sees the program that Gargantua here maps out as comically exhaustive, exaggerated, and impossible in practice,22 Marie-Luce Demonet calls the rhetoric labored23 (for me it is skilled), and Dorothée Lintner goes so far as to see him as a mocker of humanism in both that chapter and the preceding catalogue of the Saint-Victor library.24 Crucial to this point might be the frame of mind in which Gargantua, the erstwhile scholastic simpleton, composed his letter: might his ebullience in anticipating an “abysme de science” (P 8, 245; “an abyss of knowledge”: cw 161)25 not reflect the zeal of the converted, might his undermining of the humanist message relate back to his own scholastic background? One does not know, for, as is almost universal in Rabelais, the relevant information is withheld, the narrator choosing ever and again to seal off his characters’ inner discourse. Moreover, to speculate on what Gargantua might have been thinking as he composed his missive may well be to ask the wrong question, while if we do discern elements within the letter that travesty rather than support the humanist program, just as Gallet’s speech in Gargantua 30 contains some extravagant

20 21 22 23 24 25

See Screech, Rabelais, 235 ff. and 260 ff. See Gerard J. Brault, “Ung abysme de science: On the interpretation of Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel,” bhr 28 (1966): 615–632. Gray, Rabelais et le comique, 11. Marie-Luce Demonet, “Pantagrueline Humanism and Rabelaisian Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais, ed. J. O’Brien (Cambridge, Eng.: 2011), 73–92 (75). Dorothée Lintner, “Polygraphie comique chez Rabelais et Furetière,” Papers on 17th Century French Literature 74 (2011): 107–120 (118). For Gray, Rabelais et le comique, 161; the phrase is a deliberately amusing oxymoron.

498

parkin

phrasing alongside its demands for a Christian politics,26 these need not be intended to refute that position. One can easily find flaws in the mature Pantagruel’s humanist culture without concluding that his culture has failed him,27 while to parody a position is not necessarily to attack that position, though to do so opens up ambiguities which, once again, serve to augment the reader’s freedom of interpretation. Alternatively the humanist satire can furnish an important element enriching standard patterns of clan-based hostility, as for instance in the festive pranks of Panurge recounted in Pantagruel 16 where he targets successively the Parisian watchmen, the local pages and the ladies of the town along with members of the clergy and the university authorities, and, specifically in the early editions, those Sorbonne academics whose role is to stipulate the requirements of Catholic doctrine (“grabeler les articles de la foy”: ql 18, 581; cw 477: “scrutinize and garble the articles of faith”). The spirit of carnival pervades these chapters where the same pranksters turn the Latin Quarter into a place where normal business is impossible, but the leaven of anti-Sorbonne campaigning, much more veiled in later editions, cannot disguise the fact that the groups are being bullied merely because they are alien to the rogue and his merry men. Carnival allowed its revelers greater freedom to tilt at the authorities, but its intrinsic spirit was not politically subversive. At all events, knavish rascality is not a universal characteristic in Panurge, for, as some commentators have noted, the Tiers Livre sees his capacity for humor as radically diminished.28 Not so his companion rogue Frère Jean who at so many points consciously defies his vocation, refusing confession to the dying soldiers in Gargantua 27, cracking foul jokes at the dinner table in chapter 39 and rollicking rather than praying at the height of the storm in Quart Livre 19. Set against these undisciplined patterns we note, however, the naive frankness that has him declare a studious monk to be a “chose monstrueuse” (G 39, 109; “A monstrous thing,” cw 91), or that prayer is his preferred cure for insomnia. A candid rejection of the priestly role (see cl 15, 758: “Donques vous m’avez en compagnon prins pour en cestuy voyage messe chanter et confesser”; “So you’ve taken me along as a traveling companion on this trip to sing mass and give 26 27

28

Contrast in this connection Christiane Deloince-Louette, “Frère Jean des Entommeures: Chasseur et cynique,” rhlf 101 (2001): 3–20. See Alexander Dickow, “ ‘Remède contre fascherie?’ Critique de l’ apatheia dans le Tiers livre de Rabelais,” er 46 (2008): 77–99 (96), Samuel Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley: 1990), 100, and Jerome Schwartz, Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion (Cambridge, Eng.: 1990), 127. See Oumelbanine Zhiri, L’ extase et ses paradoxes: Essai sur la structure narrative du Tiers Livre (Paris: 1999), 116.

rabelaisian humor

499

confession?” cw 642) is thus set against an innocent denial of the need for the learning and devotion which Rabelais (and Erasmus) held so dear. Meanwhile Jean’s whole demeanor and behavior, including, compare his author, the abandoning of monastic life, can become vehicles of an evangelical satire that he only incidentally articulates himself, witness the interpolated comment concluding Quart Livre 8.29 All in all, he is a prime example of Rabelaisian polyvalence as mapped out by Michaël Baraz in Rabelais et la joie de la liberté (1983), and he is not alone. The inconsistencies in the characterization of Gargantua in the early chapters of Pantagruel are clear enough: is he an ignorant rustic imbued with Scholastic methodology or a student of the humanities skilled in humanist rhetoric? Moreover, his own childhood as recounted in the prequel bears interesting traces counter to the naive pattern that the narrator first establishes. Like any yokel’s offspring, he lives his early years dirtied by contact with the soil and unashamed of eating alongside the farmyard dogs, but then reverses that pattern by proving his intelligence at age five with the invention of the ideal torchecul (G 13). So may any child amaze by breaking through the limitations of infancy, thus negating their own negation of adult savoir-faire, while in this instance Rabelais also makes Gargantua into another surely unwitting flouter of scholastic method, witness the comic syllogism that he provides: “Il n’est […] poinct besoing torcher cul, sinon qu’il y ayt ordure”, etc. (G 13, 41; “There’s no need […] to wipe your ass unless there is filth”: cw 36). At this point laudable rather than contemptible he is, mirabile dictu, the cleanest boy in all the countryside, yet that pattern, along with the ingenuity, eloquence and literary skills he meanwhile displays, is invalidated virtually in toto during his shaming confrontation with the model pupil Eudémon, whereupon Rabelais’s erudite agenda becomes predominant with the appearance and appointment of Ponocrates. Once more there are complexities here, some seeing the humanist education as being parodied by the master’s program when detailed in Gargantua 23 to 24,30 and some rejecting the accolade handed by the narrator to Eudémon.31 More significant in terms of Rabelaisian humor is the way in which he manipulates his candidate hero according to the purposes of a particular saynète rather than setting him within a specific and consistent pattern of develop29 30 31

See supra, the comment is a 1552 addition, see François Rabelais, oc 1510. See Schwartz, Irony and Ideology, 72, and François Rigolot, Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: 1996), 62 ff. See Béatrice Périgot, “L’éloge ambigu du prince dans le Gargantua de Rabelais,” in L’éloge du Prince, eds. I. Cogitore and F. Goyet (Grenoble: 2003), 189–208 (206).

500

parkin

ment. Again, variety lends vitality to the text and permits wider opportunities for the humorist, witness how the activities recounted in Gargantua 11 (“Se cachoyt en l’eau pour la pluye. Battoyt à froid. Songeoyt creux”, etc.: 34; “hid in the water for rain, struck while the iron was cold, had empty thoughts”: cw 30), like the games listed in chapter 22, amount less to a meaningful theme than to a linguistic extravaganza parodying the entire process of biography. A similar pattern emerges in the description of Quaresmeprenant which moves rapidly from its basis in evangelical satire into a travesty of the blason genre, see Quart Livre 30–32. That the figure bears a name countering the spirit of Lent,32 that he actually secretes non-Lenten foods (“S’ il souspiroit, c’estoient langues de bœuf fumées”: ql 32, 613; “If he sighed, it was smoked ox tongues”: cw 505), that he possesses human and even religious characteristics (reason, will, repentance), and that, taken overall, his description remains utterly unimaginable, perhaps even a leg-pull by his describer, all serves to counter but also enrich an initial satiric pattern perhaps too obvious to remain unchallenged. The same might be said of other linguistic divertissements such as the St Victor library catalogue (P 7), Epistémon’s sojourn in Hell (P 30) or the qualities of Pantagruélion (tl 49–52) where the linear messages of antischolastic satire, of the mocking of the mighty, or the lauding of Pantagruel (“Comme Pantagruel a esté l’Idée et exemplaire de toute joyeuse perfection […] aussi en Pantagruelion je recongnoys tant de vertus” etc.: ql 51, 506; “As Pantagruel has been the ideal and exemplar of all joyous perfection […] so in Pantagruelion i recognize so many virtues”: cw 407) are quite rapidly overtaken by different patterns. The list of books becomes an opportunity for the intellectual writer (and reader?) to indulge his penchant for vulgarity and nonsense, the deflating of the big shots becomes a series of carnival floats, and the herb bearing our hero’s name a pretext for a display of the author’s classical learning and botanical knowledge, not to mention the narrator’s appetite for drink. It is our own business how we respond to his inebriated bullying of the narratee during the final chapter of the Tiers Livre (“Croyez la ou non. Ce m’est tout un […] Passons oultre […] Respondez” etc., tl 52, 509–510; “Believe it or not, it’s all one to me […] Let’s move on […] Answer me”: cw 409–410), but it is undeniable that Rabelais is here composing a variety of texts in order to dynamize what might otherwise become a tedious inventory and creating at least the potential for humor via an incongruous clash of registers.

∵ 32

See Kinser, Rabelais’s Carnival, 9.

rabelaisian humor

501

Taking a series of complex chapters in turn, and bearing in mind the humorous modes I have outlined, I should like at first to revisit and analyze the initial meeting with Panurge (P 9), given its highly ambiguous nature and its signal importance for the future development of the text. The prime incongruities within this event have often been noted, in particular the way in which Pantagruel, now an ardent scholar and surely a devout evangelical, since “science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’ame” (P 8, 245; “science without conscience is but ruin of the soul”: cw 162), unhesitatingly adopts as lifelong companion an unknown stranger of mystifying habits and who turns out to be in many ways his own antithesis, indeed arguably one of the very “gens esquelz tu ne veulx point resembler” (ibid.; “those you don’t want to resemble”: ibid.) against whom Gargantua has warned him in the previous chapter. Notwithstanding the man’s bedraggled appearance, Pantagruel intuits that he is of noble lineage (a point never confirmed) but that adventures such as befall the curious have reduced him to his current pitiable state. Can he please introduce himself? There follow the famous series of Panurge’s polyglot replies, beginning with some allegedly incomprehensible German; thus Pantagruel, “Mon amy je n’entens poinct ce barragouin” (P 9, 247; “My friend, I don’t understand a thing of this gibberish”: cw 163), but why not, given that he has his tutor beside him? And the question is still more applicable to his interlocutor’s following and relatively clear passage of Italian, for we later learn that Epistémon has indeed crossed the Alps and no doubt conferred, like Rabelais himself, with the “gens doctes […] d’Italie” (ql 11, 562; “the learned men […] of Italy”: cw 460)? Perhaps Terence Cave is right to suggest that modern languages have been neglected in Pantagruel’s education,33 but still more perplexing is the fact that Panurge’s appeals in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew also pass unheeded, for although the companion Pantagruélistes are able to identify the languages, they cannot, they admit, and shamefully for Cave,34 decipher the messages conveyed, until of course Panurge is invited to speak French, whereupon he announces himself to be a co-provincial of Rabelais (“nourry jeune au jardin de France, c’est Touraine”: P 9, 249; “born and brought up in the garden of France, that is Touraine”: cw 166) and, it would seem, of his eventual lord, a native of Utopia but also the grandson of a squire from the Chinonais. So, the behavior of Panurge in, it appears, concealing his pressing need for food and drink, is no less incongruous than the professed inability of his hearers 33 34

Terence Cave, “Panurge, Pathelin and other Polyglots,” in Lapidary Inscriptions, eds. B.C. Bowen and J.C. Nash (Lexington, KY: 1991), 171–182 (178). Cave, Pré-Histoires ii: Langues étrangères et troubles économiques au xvie siècle (Geneva: 2001), 79.

502

parkin

to respond to what is an obvious state of distress. Is Panurge therefore taking a rise out of the company by perhaps speaking too quickly or using strange accents, or are the company taking a rise out of him by pretending not to understand his meaning until the mask falls and he reverts to their native tongue?35 Once again, we are given no explicit access to any of the participants’ thoughts, Rabelais therefore supplying us with a script rather than a passage of characterization, and the enacting of that script is very much our own concern as we imagine what amounts to a piece of street theatre. We construct Panurge’s mode of delivery; we visualize his questioners’ demeanor in response; we create for ourselves their actual motivations. Rabelais has already used the scapegoating pattern in chapter 6 where the Limousin attempted to tease Pantagruel with another linguistic tour de force, only to have the tables turned on him. Here the comic potential is much richer and the reactions more problematic: how can Pantagruel delay his response to Panurge’s appeal to Christian charity as expressed in “los preceptos evangeliquos” (P 9, 248), and why does Panurge masochistically postpone the fulfilment of his needs, if indeed he is truly starving and not merely creating that impression in order to profit from the generosity of his future boon companion? Moreover, as in the storm sequence in the Quart Livre, where again the patience of the company could well be strained by a similarly extravagant Panurge, the scene ends well with a fulfilment of human appetite, for once individual rather than collective, but certainly with no reprisals on either side. However preposterously and unaccountably, the clan of Pantagruélistes is now complete, and it is appropriate at least in literary terms that an inexplicable relationship should be generated within an incomprehensible encounter.

∵ Turning to his alter ego Frère Jean, we find his first appearance to be much less ambiguous. Praised quite extravagantly by the narrator, the man emerges at a crucial point in the onset of war, interrupting his fellow monks at their service in order to warn that Picrochole’s soldiers are despoiling the monastery’s vineyard. His priorities of action before devotions are thus made clear, while to emphasize that their future wine-stocks are at threat, Rabelais includes the impish gag da mihi potum (G 27, 78), so parodying Christ’s meeting with the

35

See Schwartz, Irony and Ideology, 33–34.

rabelaisian humor

503

woman of Samaria.36 The contrast with the other monks who remain pedantically at prayer is an obvious element in Rabelais’s evangelical satire, but the remainder of Gargantua 27 changes the mode somewhat dramatically in its description of Jean’s counterattack. Assailing the marauders violently and without mercy, he hacks them to pieces, breaking their spines, impaling them through their backsides, staving in their breastbones and displaying a brutality that some deem inappropriate: “Les temps modernes marqueront lentement la fin de cette figure complexe,”37 though any devotee of children’s video amusements might question the point. And that is a significant reservation, given that the entire Picrocholine War, and more particularly its opening sequences, can be compared to a child’s game,38 and its ritualistic patterns and context (“la saison de vendanges”: G 25, 73; “the vintage season”: cw 62) again support the relaxing rather than the imposing of serious values. Those values are of course forced upon one in other sequences, such as the description of the atrocities committed by the Lerné troops at the outset of chapter 27, but Frère Jean’s behavior later in that same chapter where he commands his junior fellows (“les petits moinetons”: 80; “the little monklets”: cw 68) to cut the throats of the wounded, and in fact using kids’ pocket-knives, would bear comparison with theirs, were it not for the fact that Rabelais has again changed modes, moving from a serious, here essentially political satire, into a passage of knavish parody where wrong becomes right. That mode is itself negated in the next chapter where Grandgousier writes to Gargantua summoning him home to participate in a war that will be conducted “à moindre effusion de sang que sera possible” (G 29, 85: Frère Jean, please note; “with the least possible bloodshed”: cw 71), but the integration of the monk into the company of the Gargantuistes is effected totally and unambiguously in the feast depicted in chapter 39 where he is lauded for his prowess and emerges as the life and soul of the occasion, entertaining the company with jokes, riddles, comical allusions to the Bible and oaths which, in response to the humanist Ponocrates’s rejoinder, he dismisses as ornaments of classical rhetoric. Rabelais could continue in this manner, but as in the somewhat similar feast offered to the three sages in the Tiers Livre, he avoids straining the reader’s patience, by shifting into a reflective and analytical mode initiated by Eudémon when he remarks on Jean’s exceptional honnesteté and entertainment value. 36 37 38

John 4:7. See Frère Jean’s “Venite apotemus” (G 41, 114) and the drunkards’ “Sitio” (G 5, 19), both irreverent allusions to the Bible. Giovanna Angeli, “Comique et cruauté à la fin du moyen âge: Panurge et Villon,” Le moyen français 44–45 (2000): 9–20 (19). As in Jean-Yves Pouilloux, Rabelais: Rire est le propre de l’homme (Paris: 1993), 48.

504

parkin

Given this example, why do good companies ostracize and not welcome monks? There follows a passage of detailed religious satire, articulated by Gargantua and where Rabelais may well be giving vent to the frustrations of his own monastic career (“Ilz marmonnent grand renfort de legendes et pseaulmes nullement par eux entenduz. Ilz content force patenostres entrelardées de longs Aue mariaz, sans y penser ny entendre”: G 40, 111; “They mutter a great plenty of legends and psalms not in the least understood by them; they recite plenty of paternosters interlarded with long Ave Marias, without thinking about them or understanding them”: cw 93), but their adoptive bon compaignon is exempted from criticism on the basis of his honesty, hard work, protection of the oppressed, comforting of the afflicted (Picrochole’s soldiery please note) and his defence of the clos de l’abbaye. The spirit of this eulogy is easy to discern, its details perhaps less so, but as an example of one Rabelaisian character being subjected to analysis by his companions, it foreshadows the (much less advantageous treatment) of Panurge in the Tiers Livre. At this point in Gargantua Jean the people’s friend is set alongside Jean the vulgar hedonist (“Mais or czà à boyre, à boyre, czà. Aporte le fruict”: G 40, 111; “But here now, some drink! Some drink here! Bring the fruit”: cw 94), while Rabelais problematizes the satire by having the monk describe his own attitude during matins or a commemorative mass where, rather than committing himself to acts of piety, he dedicates his time to useful farmyard practices like mending rabbit traps and making arrows (G 40). Is he naively unmindful of what liturgical practice represents, or does he consciously repudiate the value of ritual devotions? In the latter case he is very close to Rabelais’s own attitude, witness how rarely if ever we see his heroes partake of any sacrament, but to be clear on the matter we would need once again to have evidence of Jean’s actual thoughts. Otherwise the pattern resembles Panurge’s Latin Quarter pranks to the extent that the author’s value-based satire is combined with an insolent (or is it innocent?) denial of conventional behavior: Jean uses prayer as a soporific, then wakes the company with a popular song, defies medical advice (no doubt including his author’s) by drinking immediately on arising, but still combines the two comic modes of satire and parody by quoting Mark 2:27: “Les heures sont faictez pour l’homme, et non l’ homme pour les heures” (G 41, 114; “Hours are made for man, not man for hours”: cw 96). As a passage integrated into the war narrative and set alongside Gargantua’s serious comments on the monastic vocation, this section represents one of the many improvements on Pantagruel where, in chapters 16–17, Panurge plays practical jokes on the clergy and steals from the church, but in an episode which lacks a certain satiric dimension, partly owing to the absence of the giant hero (though the more active role Rabelais here assigns to the narrator does in

505

rabelaisian humor

part compensate). The same can hardly be said, however, of the next passage I should like to examine, namely the lunch party organized by that hero to help resolve his friend’s perplexité (tl 29–36).

∵ At the outset, and in a joke derived from Castiglione (see oc, 1422), Panurge decries the plan, given that it will involve asking advice from the representatives of three professions, none of which command respect: most theologians are heretics, doctors never take their own drugs, nor do lawyers ever sue one another. The comment is noteworthy as inciting Pantagruel to adopt the role of raisonneur in arguing against Panurge’s clan-based shaft, which echoes such false generalizations as would have all politicians be corrupt or all students drunkards. In fact the key task of good theologians is to eradicate heresy, while good doctors rely on prophylaxis and thus do not need drugs, the bons advocatz are too busy representing their clients to have time to sue their peers, and his logic is no less sound at this point than when he set Panurge’s eulogy of debt in the broader context of feudal responsibility, or sought to use common-sense advice to resolve his friend’s confusion over marriage issue: “Puis […] qu’ une foys en avez jecté le dez […] et prins en ferme deliberation, plus parler n’en fault, reste seulement la mettre à execution” (tl 9, 377; “Since once […] you’ve cast the dice […] and made a firm plan to do it, there’s nothing more to say about it; all that remains is to put it into execution”: cw 282). However, given that the entire role of the comic hero is to defy logic and common sense, we are in no way required to take Pantagruel’s side and so kill the humor stimulated by Panurge’s irreverent and irresponsible crack. The same can be said of the man’s consistent though not universal rejection of the obvious as he argues that the oracles’ predictions throughout the Tiers Livre indicate a favorable outcome to his marriage. One can condemn his obstinacy but may also admire his ingenuity as in arguing that the horns of which he dreamed prior to Tiers Livre 14 were not those of a cuckold but rather horns of plenty. After all, what is the point of a riddle which has too obvious a solution, and might one not even criticize Pantagruel for so inflexibly rebuffing Panurge’s mental dexterity? In fact, however one views its subject, the lunch party is assembled in a spirit of goodwill and courtesy, especially as embodied in the theologian Hippothadée who exhorts the lustful Panurge to marry, and to marry properly in respect of Pauline teaching, for a good wife well-chosen will remain loyal, especially if her husband sets the example by living “pudicquement, chastement, vertueusement” (tl 30, 447; “continently, chastely, virtuously”: cw 350), qualities which one could scarcely imagine in a married Panurge, if indeed one

506

parkin

would wish to reform him in such terms. To be sure, and no less than Pantagruel elsewhere, Hippothadée is appealing to norms conscientiously evoked and most probably upheld by Rabelais himself, but again they are norms irrelevant to the counter-world that Panurge inhabits. Hence, he summarily dismisses Hippothadée’s advice, given that it requires that he behave responsibly and thus defy his own nature, while he rejects the spouse as described in biblical teaching as an ideal incompatible with his case. That much is true to the extent that Panurge will remain a bachelor, and one incapable of setting a consistent moral example for friends and readers alike, and nor does the dynamic of his role as developed permit one to imagine a happy future in wedlock, Rabelais having predicted as much at the end of Pantagruel: “vous verrez comment Panurge fut marié, et cocqu dés le premier moys de ses nopces” (P 34, 336; “you shall see: how Panurge got married, and was cuckolded right from the first month of his marriage”: cw 244)? So we pass on to the second counsellor, the doctor Rondibilis. It is much to Rabelais’s credit that he varies the patterns of these chapters so much, Rondibilis proving a somewhat less attractive figure than the previous contributor, and one who largely replaces a biblical apparatus with a scientific and classical one. In giving counsel to Panurge he pleases him by advising frequent sex as a palliative to lust but argues that any married man runs the risk of cuckoldry given woman’s inconstant and hypocritical nature. These flaws are so deep that Plato felt tempted even to exclude her from the human race, and the chapter concerned (tl 32) has been read as the most antifeminist of Rabelais’s entire work.39 Is it a value-based satire of the female sex or merely a piece of banter intended to reassure a male tribe ever fearful of being unable to meet their partners’ physical needs? Again one has a choice, but it is noteworthy that Rondibilis’s blanket condemnation of womanhood (“Ainsi sont toutes femmes femmes”: tl 32, 453; “Thus are all women women”: cw 355) is countered by his own admission that some “preudes femmes” (ibid., 455; “upright women”: ibid., 356) do lead blameless lives (compare Pantagruel on the theologians, etc., as above), while Rabelais’s narrator notes how some of his own classical forebears have spoken “par guayeté de cœur […] plus que par recherchement de Verité” (ibid., 454–455; “heedlessly […] more than in the quest for truth”: ibid., 356): could this be a sly wink to the reader? Now come some fairly trivial anecdotes supplied by Panurge’s friends, plus an interesting exchange of repartee where the legist Panurge mocks the physician confronting him, whereupon the initiative passes to the sage Trouillo-

39

See oc, 1426.

507

rabelaisian humor

gan, already praised by Pantagruel as a “philosophe perfaict” (tl 29, 445; “perfect philosopher”: cw 348), but who proceeds merely to bewilder Panurge by responding to all his questions with an evasiveness redolent of the sceptic. Given this connection, reinforced by Gargantua’s condemnation of the state of modern philosophy (“Doncques sont huy les plus doctes et prudens philosophes entrez on phrontistere et escholle des Pyrrhoniens”: tl 36, 466; “So then today the most learned and prudent philosophers have entered into the think-tank and school of the Pyrrhonists”: cw 367), it is unsurprising that the passage has been read as a satire of the Pyrrhonian trend of Renaissance thought. However, it has often gone unnoticed that amid a whole series of misleading and irrelevant replies Trouillogan does make an unambiguous statement concerning Panurge’s future (“Qui me fera coqu?” […] “Quelqu’un”: tl 36, 465; “Who will make me a cuckold? […] Someone”: cw 366), even if Panurge’s overall response is one of hostile bafflement, while Gargantua reacts by walking out. Where now the perfect philosopher predicted by Pantagruel, and where now the atmosphere of pious and sober festivity that Barbara Bowen rightly sees as suitable to reasoned discussion?40 Trouillogan may therefore be satirized on a value basis in that he fails to elucidate a clear intellectual position, although Gargantua, Pantagruel, Rondibilis, and Hippothadée do make relevant suggestions at the end of Tiers Livre 35.41 Conversely Panurge emerges as once again the scapegoat, being teased by an interlocutor whose series of nonsensical replies camouflage what one might read as a statement of the obvious—someone will cuckold Panurge—were it not for the fact that he will never marry, even in the Cinquiesme Livre, which fact excludes that possibility. Alternatively, the entire duologue, avowedly “the banquet’s […] most facetious consultation,”42 could easily form another comic script readable in many ways apart from the satiric mode, for instance as a parody of Socratic dialogue in which both respondents behave as clowns for the amusement of their audience. To this extent Trouillogan would be an inversion of the reflective intellectual one might expect, and Panurge not a confused muddle-head, but merely a comic foil.

∵ 40 41 42

Bowen, Enter Rabelais, 149. See Bernd Renner’s readings in “ ‘Ni l’ un ni l’ autre et tous les deux à la fois’: Le paradoxe ménippéen dans le Tiers livre de Rabelais,” Romanic Review 97 (2006): 153–168 (163–164). See George Hoffmann, “Neither one nor the other and both together,” er 25 (1991): 79–90 (82).

508

parkin

That Rabelais offers these choices to his reader is again a mark of his comic inventiveness, a point reinforced by the episode involving the jurist Bridoye, absent of course from the banquet because now subject to judicial proceedings himself. Concerned for a man whose saintly career has been so long and successful, Pantagruel heads off to witness the trial being held at the “parlement Myrelinguois en Myrelingues” (tl 44, 489; cw 391) and where he makes a signal and eloquent plea on behalf of the man, who in fact is never called upon to express an opinion concerning Panurge, but merely to defend his practice of deciding cases by the use of dice. Unsurprisingly the lengthy plea made by Bridoye has been analyzed in depth, Duncan Derrett in particular underlining the various patterns of satire that it reveals: Rabelais is targeting medieval legal learning, the venality of lawyers and the legal system itself, including the methods of Bridoye’s present judges whose employment of dice is justified by the practice of alea iudiciorum.43 But what of Bridoye himself who makes this rambling and fundamentally preposterous plea? His satire could be conscious, the repeated jibe “comme vous aultres messieurs” (“like you gentlemen”) being delivered sarcastically. Conversely he can be read as an example of naive parody, being now old and unable to handle either his case or his professional work: this much is suggested by Pantagruel who defends him on the basis of his “vieillesse” and “simplesse” (tl 43, 486; “old age […] simplicity”: cw 388), noting in addition that he has only made one false judgement in a career of more than forty years during which this “venerable et souveraine court” (ibid., 487; “venerable and sovereign Court”: ibid., 389) has been his constant support. If, however, we read him as cynically adopting this mask of ingenuousness, then he becomes himself a target of the attack contained in his speech, and Pantagruel a victim of his cunning. Finally we could support him in this role as a conscious and knavish, albeit implicit denouncer of his own vocation, not dissimilar to fictitious characters like the Vicar of Bray or Sir Humphrey Appleby in the bbc sitcom Yes Minister, and if one reads the scene as a piece of legal parody composed in the spirit of Basoche entertainments, the latter analogy might seem the more appropriate. As yet another polyvalent character Bridoye can thus be interpreted using any of the four patterns I am concerned to illustrate, and when scholars make a decision in this respect, Edwin Duval dismissing him as an old fool or Screech as a (naive) fool in Christ,44 they are acting legitimately, but only if they remain

43 44

See J. Duncan M. Derrett, “Rabelais’ Legal Learning and the Trial of Bridoye,”bhr 25 (1963): 111–171. See Jean Céard, “Le Jugement de Bridoye,” Cahiers Textuel 15 (1996): 49–62 (51).

509

rabelaisian humor

accepting of alternative versions. Again, the richness of Rabelais’s comic technique lies precisely in the opportunities that he offers to his readers, while to limit them to a single explanation, especially of a character so fully depicted, would be to impair the reading process. One notes, moreover, that the Pantagruélistes insist in their final comments that Bridoye should be judged positively, given his “simplicité et affection syncere” (tl 44, 489; “simplicity and sincere good intent”: cw 391), but then shift into a savage attack on the court which Pantagruel has so recently and respectfully addressed: is it a “venerable et souveraine court,” or rather a place of “iniquité” and “corruptele” (ibid., 489; “iniquity and corruption”: ibid., 391)? The confusion is blatant and once again suggests that Pantagruel is not the ultimate arbiter of our judgment.

∵ The giant might even become the target of our satire at certain points in the Quart Livre, as when his prowess at javelin throwing is parodied by the narrator in chapter 34, or he fails to identify the source of the frozen words (chapter 56) or reproves Frère Jean for an irreverent joke whose equivalents the man has cracked often enough before (chapter 50). However, as we are reminded in the rewritten conclusion to Pantagruel, the spirit of Pantagruélisme is not to pick nits, but rather to enjoy the company of well-intentioned celebrants, as portrayed in the departure from Thalasse where a collective and un-sacramental act of worship, initiated by the leader, is followed by food and drink in a structure so frequently reiterated and right up to chapter 65, if not beyond in the reader’s imagination. That procedure is recreated consistently if not universally during the various landings that occur on the voyage. They often coincide with festivals or feasts that even include the one offered by the detestable Homenaz in whom an indulgent reader might still find some redeeming features. The pattern also helps offset the seriousness underlying some of the more somber allegories portrayed in the Quart Livre, such as the Papefigues escale or the Andouilles War, while the Procuration section tends to invert it by firstly excluding any hospitable gesture from the inhabitants (“Ils ne nous inviterent à boyre ne à manger”: 564; “They invited us neither to drink nor eat”: not translated by Frame) and then having Panurge tell a tale where a series of wedding parties, punctuated by the jovial tradition of cuffing the bride and groom, are contrasted with negative elements of violence and hostility. Interrupted by the equally vicious tale of the punishing of the sacristan Tappecoue, his story combines three episodes in which a series of bailiffs are dispatched by a local prior to the castle of the lord Basché, revealed as a heroic

510

parkin

veteran of Louis xii’s Italian campaigns. The first arrival is tricked into attending a fake marriage during which the ritual “petitz coups de poing” (ql 12, 566; “little punches with your fist”: cw 463) turn into vicious blows against the intruder who is severely injured in the process, though still satisfied with an experience which surgical treatment helps him in due course to survive. The party mood continues after he leaves the scene, the nobleman offering a feast to family and retainers alike, though four days later another enemy agent turns up, kneels before the magnate and argues that in delivering his citation he is only doing his job. He is offered a drink and then an invitation to further nuptials supposedly being celebrated in the castle, whereupon the same trick is played and with similar results: the blows rain down on the victim, drawing blood from his nose, ears and eyes, following which he is packed off home on his glanderous horse. No more is heard of him, but the next day, for want of any record that his mission was fulfilled, three agents reappear on site and are duly involved in the same charade, with the difference that they strike first, only to then endure injuries no less severe than their predecessors’ and which Rabelais describes with great linguistic extravagance. In this case there is, or at least appears to be suffering all round,45 hence the bride, be she genuine or a sham, is seen weeping over her discomfiture, some of it sexual, and the wounded maître d’ hôtel denounces the whole event as not “fiansailles,” but “fiantailles de merde” (ql 15, 575; “a wedding” or “a shitty turding”: cw 471). Back to their base in the Chinonais, the dupes yet declare their aggressor to be the finest “home de bien” (ibid.), lord of the most honorable of households and host to a wedding such as they have never experienced; words true enough in the latter case. Pantagruel may add a conscientious rider to the events described (“Ceste narration […] sembleroit joyeuse, ne feust que davant nos œilz fault la craincte de Dieu continuellement avoir”: ql 16, 576; “This story […] would seem merry, were it not that we must continually have the fear of God before our eyes”: cw 472), but that comment, made by “so wet a blanket” as the giant risks becoming,46 need barely command our reading of the sequence, and more particularly of its humor. The pattern whereby hostile figures are punished, be it on a clan or a value basis, is scarcely unique, though Rabelais will skirt round it in the Papimanes episode where Pantagruel praises his hosts in terms not unlike those just quoted.47 The black humor, evident in the lengthy descriptions of injuries,

45 46 47

Rigolot, Langages, 128 ff. notes that Basché’s retainers can be seen as feigning their injuries. See Screech, Rabelais, 338. “Oncques ne veiz Christians meilleurs que sont ces bons Papimanes” (ql 54, 666; “I’ve

rabelaisian humor

511

has its precedents during the Picrocholine war, witness in particular Gargantua 44,48 but the setting here is explicitly rather than implicitly festive, a point frequently underlined by the narrator Panurge, who refers repeatedly to the laughter, joy, playfulness, good food and cheer that characterize the different occasions and are, somewhat incongruously, shared by the objects of ridicule: thus “Chiquanous bien repeu et abbrevé entre avecques Oudart en salle […] A son entrée chascun commença soubrire. Chiquanous rioit par compaignie” (ql 14, 571; “Shysteroo, well supplied with food and drink, comes into the hall with Oudart […] At his entrance everybody began to smile. Shysteroo was laughing sociably”: cw 468), while in chapter 15 the plangent bride is in fact laughing through her tears: “La nouvelle mariée pleurante rioyt, riante pleuroit”, etc. (574; “The new bride was crying as she laughed, laughing as she cried”: cw 471). Rabelais’s intention seems plain: he is creating one other ambivalent scenario where values (for instance of compassion and neighborliness) are compromised by their opposites, where a satiric attack on a social enemy is taken to unreasonable extremes, where clan identities such as those separating wedding guests from wedding hosts are confused in an atmosphere and description of mayhem, and where the spirit of banquet merry-making is contrasted with that of brutal rough-housing, a pattern indicated by Basché’s quoted oxymorons “Tragicque comédie” and “tragicque farce” (ql 12, 566 and ql 13, 570; “tragic comedy”, “tragic farce”: cw 463 and 467).49 Yet again one reads as one chooses, but that Rabelais was an unremitting proponent of bacchanalian carousals will be refuted by the Gaster episode, if not elsewhere: as Cave opined long ago, uber risks becoming tuber,50 at which point both reader and author will look for a change of scene and subject. Moreover, what of Panurge, here given the roles of storyteller and thus mouthpiece of Rabelais’s attack on a species of social enemy that might even

48

49

50

never seen better Christians that these Papimaniacs are”: cw 555); see Screech’s revealing comments on this passage in Rabelais, 408 ff. For example: “Lors d’ un coup [Frère Jean] luy tranchit la teste, luy coupant le test sus les os petrux et enlevant les deux os bregmatis et la commissure sagittale, avecques grande partie de l’ os coronal,” etc. (G 44, 120; “Then with one blow he cut off his head, slicing his scalp over the os petrux, and taking off the two parietal bones and the parietal suture with a large part of the frontal bone”: cw 102). See Renner’s significant comments on these words and the passage in general in “From Satura to Satyre: François Rabelais and the Renaissance Appropriation of a Genre,” rq 67 (2014), 377–424 (409 ff.). The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: 1979), chapter 5.

512

parkin

have personal significance?51 Very different was his previous tale from Pantagruel 14 which recounted the alleged escape from captivity in Turkey in a tall story which amuses for being so preposterous and may be read as a leg-pull of any credulous listener or reader. I regard it as a pack of lies from beginning to end, while its slender satiric import amounts to a clan-based attack on a nation who would long remain one of the bugbears of Western Europe.52 In the Procuration sequence the satire is more significant but may again be located within clan issues whereby legal officials such as policemen, magistrates and judges become easy targets for those whose lives and livelihoods they can, rightly or wrongly, injure. However, though Basché’s carefully laid plans resemble Panurge’s scheme of revenge on Dindenault, they have no direct connection with Panurge as an individual, for once his tale is told, he scarcely figures in the episode, Frère Jean taking over the action by obliging one of the masochistic inhabitants of this island who earn money by being beaten. No less than the Chicanous does the fellow enjoy a treatment that he endures “à face riante et joyeuse” (ql 16, 577; with “smiling and joyous face”: cw 473), but we note that the role of (comic?) persecutor has passed from Panurge (see chapter 8) to his companion, while the victims become one more variety of the comic simpletons we encounter so frequently during the voyage of the Thalamège: “Qui veut guaingner vincgt escuz d’or, pour estre battu en Diable?” asks the monk; “Io, io, io, respondirent tous” (ql 16, 576–577; “Who wants to earn twenty crowns for getting a devil of a beating? Yo, yo, yo, they all answered?”: cw 472). Again, variety is essential to both the textual material and the humor it generates, hence in chapter 17 it is the narrator who takes on the role of comic raconteur by listing a series of amusing deaths recounted in antiquity, before Panurge again takes center stage in the storm sequence. Here one need scarcely rehearse the points so often made concerning his abject performance in chapters 18 to 21 when the danger is at its height, as contrast his irritating display of self-righteousness in chapters 23 to 24 once that danger is past, except to say that his reactions are all too human while the response of his companions is only incidentally to condemn him. On hearing that he will never fulfil the vows made during the tempest, Eusthènes refers aptly to the Italian proverb “passato el pericolo, gabato el santo,”53 but it is left to the reader to pass any defining judgement.

51 52 53

See Rabelais, oc, 1517, on the identities of the local characters here depicted. For one minor instance see Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, bk. 2, ch. 4. “Danger gone by, saint high and dry” (cw, 490); and see Rabelais, ql 24, 597, for the Erasmian echo in this detail.

513

rabelaisian humor

Yes, Panurge has entirely misread the omen represented by the fleet of monks heading to the “concile de Chesil” (ql 18, 581; Council of Chesil: cw 477), while his reaction to the subsequent peril has all the marks of that superstitious religiosity that the Evangelicals sought to abolish. However we should also recall that he participated tacitly if not actively in the thoroughly evangelical act of worship that preceded their departure (“feut hault et clair faicte priere à Dieu,” etc.: ql 1, 538; “prayers were said loud and clear to God”: cw 438), that in chapter 52 he contributes along with all his companions as they ridicule the pope-worshipping Homenaz, and that, as previously noted, in chapter 65 it is he who expresses that devotion to God alone (rather than the Virgin or the saints) which is surely central to Rabelais’s own faith: “Sans poinct de faulte nous doibvons bien louer le bon Dieu nostre createur, servateur, conservateur”, etc. (ql 65, 694; “Without fail we must highly praise the good God, our Creator, Savior, Preserver”: cw 586).

∵ The conclusion is simple. Rabelais will make what he chooses of his main comic character, while allowing a similar freedom to his readers. The leitmotif of Panurge’s panic, a traditional attribute of the fool and one which we can trace back even to Pantagruel,54 is requoted even too frequently in the Quart Livre, and it can justify his being scapegoated in the same way as his blindness to the obvious made him ridiculous during the previous volume. Yet at the same time as criticizing him or even despising him for these weaknesses, we can also forgive his naive unawareness of them, while admiring his ability to engender high points of comedy, noting also that he is fully capable of defending women,55 the clan he has so consistently offended elsewhere, of praising “ce benoist venerable frère Jean” (ql 65, 694; “this blessed venerable Frère Jean.”: cw 586), so often his outspoken antagonist, and, all in all, of fitting happily into the clan of Pantagruélistes, however sporadically he may be seen to share their values. My argument may seem complex, but my message is straightforward. Various modes of humor coexist in the work of every comic genius and one enjoys them variously depending on one’s own personality and preferences. 54 55

“S’ en fouit le grand pas de peur des coups: lesquelz il craignoit naturellement” (P 21, 295; “He ran away at a good pace, for fear of blows, of which by nature he was afraid.” cw 206). “Ce guorgias Euripides […] tous jours a mesdict des femmes. Aussi feut il par vengeance divine mangé des Chiens” (ql 65, 693; “That show-off Euripides […] always spoke ill of women. And so by divine vengeance he was eaten by dogs.”: cw 585).

514

parkin

Rabelais, arch-exponent of “rires multiples,”56 thus offers us the choice of reading Bridoye either as a scoundrel or as an innocent, of emphasising Frère Jean’s offensive profanity at the expense of his good nature, of seeing in Rondibilis a misogynistic charlatan rather than a respectable medic, of characterizing Trouillogan as a sharp-witted mickey-taker and not the enigmatic Paulinist that Pantagruel discerns in him. Climaxing this trend, our Panurge, a vital figure, though still but one element in Rabelais’s comic apparatus, may be an object of our mockery, a subject of our amused disapproval, a focus of our indulgence, a stimulus to our guilty admiration, or, more probably a combination of all of these and more. A censorious reader might challenge one’s right to enjoy Rabelaisian scatology or his religious satires: one may defy him in turn on the basis of Rabelais’s carnivalesque inversions, but he still retains the right to defend the norms revoked by those inversions. However, once we have opted to enjoy the details of Rabelais’s humor rather than to question its bases, we do so on our own terms, laughing as we choose, but hopefully loud and long.57 56 57

See Mireille Huchon, “Les Rires de Rabelais,” in Rire à la Renaissance, ed. M.M. Fontaine (Geneva: 2010), 123–139 (137). This chapter may be read as a companion piece to my own “The Polygelastic Rabelais,” er 44 (2006): 44–62.

chapter 20

The World in Pantagruel’s Gut Jeff Persels

The subject of Scatalogic or Stercoraceous Rites and Practices, however repellent it may be under some of its aspects, is none the less deserving of the profoundest consideration,—if for no other reason than that from the former universal dissemination of such aberrations of the intellect, as well as of the religious impulses of the human race, and their present curtailment or restriction, the progress of humanity upward and onward may best be measured.1

∵ Given the topic, it is perhaps appropriate to begin at the end. In a provocative 1971 article entitled simply “La Fin du Quart Livre,” Marcel Tetel offered one of the first critical assessments to take Rabelais’s notorious predilection for the scatological seriously.2 A propos the concluding passage of the last uncontested volume of the chronicles, Panurge’s blustering explication cum justification of his shit-splattered state: Dictez vous, respondit Panurge, que j’ay paour? Pas maille. Je suis par la vertus Dieu, plus couraigeux, que si j’eusse autant de mousches avallé, qu’il en est mis en paste dedans Paris, depuys la feste sainct Jan jusques à la Toussains. Ha, ha, ha? Houay? Que Diable est cecy? Appellez vous cecy foyre, bren, crottes, merde, fiant, dejection, matiere fecale, excrement, repaire, laisse, esmeut, fumée, estront, scybale, ou spyrathe? C’ est (croy je) sapphran d’Hibernie. Ho, ho, hie. C’ est sapphran d’ Hibernie. “Sela, Beuvons.”3 1 John G. Bourke, Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (Washington, D.C.: 1891), iii. 2 Marcel Tetel, “La fin du Quart livre,” Romanische Forschungen 83 (1971): 517–527. 3 François Rabelais, ql 67, 700–701. “ ‘Are you saying,’ said Panurge, ‘that I’m afraid? Not a bit of it, by the power of God! I’m more courageous than if I’d swallowed as many flies as are put into pies from Midsummer Day to All Saints’ Day. Ha ha ha! Whay! What the devil is this stuff? Do

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_022

516

persels

Tetel sees the embodiment of an entire ars poetica, the arc of which reaches back to the concluding, similarly enumerative and excremental analogy of the first-published volume, Pantagruel. There, the first-person narrator Alcofribas Nasier, making common cause with the ideal reader who reads the work for the same, ostensibly innocent reason he himself has written it, to pass the time joyously, censures his imagined censors: Quant est de leur estude, elle est toute consummée à la lecture de livres Pantagruelicques: non tant pour passer temps joyeusement, que pour nuyre à quelcun meschantement, sçavoir est, articulant, monorticulant, torticulant, culletant, couilletant, et diabliculant, c’ est à dire callumniant. Ce que faisans semblent es coquins de village qui fougent et escharbottent la merde des petitz enfans en la saison des cerises et guignes pour trouver les noyaulx, et iceulx vendre es drogueurs qui font l’ huile de Maguelet.4 Where critics see only “ordure dangereuse” (“dangerous filth”), Tetel proposes that Alcofribas/Panurge/Rabelais has hidden precious drugs: “Il déclare catégoriquement que ses livres sont différents et originaux; c’ est la dernière impression qu’il s’efforce de laisser à la postérité.”5 It is precisely this “different […] last impression,” this soiled ars poetica, or more accurately, ars scatologica, that will be the focus of the following interpretation of the Rabelaisian corpus. But first, a working definition. The Greek-inspired neologism scatophage (Σχατοφάγος “dirt-devourer, excrement-eater,” as Randle Cotgrave alliteratively glossed it in 1611) appears in the Quart Livre, prompting an entry in Rabelais’s own contemporary lexicon, the Briefve declaration d’aulcunes dictions: “Maschemerdes: vivens de excremens. Ainsi est de Aristophanes in Pluto nommé Aescalapius en mocquerie commune à tous medecins.”6 Neither it nor you call this turds, crap, droppings, shit, stool, elimination, fecal matter, excrement, fumets, leavings, scybale or spyrathe? It is, I do believe, Hibernian saffron. Ho, ho, hee! It’s Hibernian saffron! Sela! Let’s drink up!’ ” (cw, 592). Translations of other texts are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 4 P 34, 337. cw, 245: “As regards their study, it is entirely consecrated to the reading of the Pantagruelic books, not so much to pass the time joyously as to harm someone wickedly, to wit by articulating, monorticulating, torticulating, buttock-wagging, ballock-shaking, and diaboliculating that is to say calumniating. Doing which, they are like those village scavengers who dig up and spread around little children’s shit, in the season, for all kinds of cherries, so as to find the pits and sell these to the druggists, who make pomander oil out of them.” 5 Tetel, “La fin du Quart livre,” 527: “He declares categorically that his books are different and original; this is the last impression he contrives to leave for posterity.” 6 bd, 707; cw, 598: “crapcrunchers living on excrements. Thus is Aesculapius called by Aristo-

the world in pantagruel’s gut

517

scatologie, its associated study or science, makes it again into French dictionaries until the 19th century. The latter seems, in fact, to be of very late coinage: “Étymol. et Hist. 1868 (Souviron, Dict. des termes techniques ds Quem. ddl t. 12). Formé de scato-* et de -logie*,” according to the preeminent lexicon of French public-funded research, the Trésor de la langue française (tlf). Therein it is tagged simply as covering “[l’]ensemble d’ écrits ou propos grossiers qui traitent des excréments; caractéristique de tels écrits, de tels propos.” The tlf reproduces faithfully, with the exception of one critical nuance, the concision of the official Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, which waited until its 8th edition (1932–1935) to recognize: “scatologie. n. f. Propos, écrits qui ont trait aux excréments.” The dictionary defines excrement as: “Matière solide ou fluide qui sort du corps de l’homme ou des animaux par l’ effet d’ une évacuation naturelle.” This may be usefully compared to Cotgrave’s interpretation of excremens as: “Excrements; or, the purging of any part of the bodie; (hence) also, dregs, ordure, filth, or filthie evacuations.” Saliva, mucus, semen, saline (tears), blood, sputum, cerumen, sebum and even, broadly speaking, keratin (hair and nails), are all technically excreted (excernere, to separate, sift, sort) from the body “as a result of natural evacuation,” and almost all figure explicitly to some extent in the embodiment of Rabelais’s large and varied cast of human, animal, and fantastical characters. However, as his own clarification regarding scatophage would suggest, what dominates, often to the point of scandalizing succeeding generations of readers and thereby arousing a desire to explain it (away, primarily), is a perceived preoccupation with feces and urine.7 In some respects, this is curious, as even a cursory consultation of the actual statistics, such as those generated by J.E.G. Dixon and John L. Dawson for the official Rabelais concordance, reveals a most useful update and companion to Charles Joseph Marty-Laveaux’s two-volume glossaire appended to his late 19th-century edition of the complete works.8 If the word cul (“ass”) proper occurs over 70 times, terms associated with its primary function and product show up with less frequency, e.g. bren (Cotgrave: “turd, mans dung, excrement, ordure”) or breneux/se (Cotgrave: “beshitten, all-too-berayed; full of turd, filth, ordure”): 22; variants of chier (Cotgrave: “to shite, cacke, scummer, untruss the phanes in his Plutus, in general mockery of all physicians.” Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: 1611). 7 For a recent treatment of scatology and scandal, see Jan Miernowski, “The Prologue of Gargantua; or, A Lesson in Scandal Management,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais, ed. T.W. Reeser and F. Gray (New York: 2011), 100–109. 8 Jack E.G. Dixon and John L. Dawson (eds.), Concordance des œuvres de François Rabelais, (er) 26 (Geneva: 1992); Charles Joseph Marty-Laveaux, Les Œvvres de Maistre François Rabelais (Paris: 1868–1902).

518

persels

points, goe to the stoole, doe that which no bodie can doe for him”): 12; plays on merde (Cotgrave: “mans dung, turd, excrements, ordure”): 24.9 And if filtered for their figurative (and thus mitigated) use in popular interjection or invective—pervasive then as now—they make considerably less of an impact. Moreover, that impact is chiefly limited to specific, albeit critical, episodes and, increasingly as the chronicles mature and (arguably) darken from the early 1530s through the 1540s, to one specific character: Panurge. It is, rather, their tactical use and placement that gives them prominence, as in the abovementioned instances Tetel paired and from which he proposed to draw a serious hermeneutic strategy, one which I will pursue infra. As chance would have it, Tetel’s concise 1971 proposal coincided with the belated appearance of a major iconoclastic work that would both liberate and revolutionize Rabelaisian studies, most specifically with regard to the scatological. Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable was Englished in 1968 by Hélène Iswolsky as Rabelais and His World before being translated into French in 1970 by Andrée Robel as L’ œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance.10 Scatology is integral to Bakhtin’s foregrounding and exposition of what he considers to be Rabelais’s radical exploitation of folklore in a subversive carnivalesque challenge to official religious and political culture and authority. The work’s sixth chapter, in particular, articulates the notion of “the material bodily lower stratum,” an awkward but nonetheless effective coinage, for subsequent generations of readers. Since then, Bakhtin’s insistence on the “mighty thrust downward into the bowels of the earth, into the depths of the human body,” which he sees as “reflected in Rabelais’ entire world from beginning to end,” has reached and informed a much more fundamental shift of scholarly attention to popular culture, spawning numerous reassessments of the very notion of the distinction between the high and the low, and well beyond the Rabelaisian corpus.11

9

10

11

Of course, when compared to Montaigne, as parsed in the Leakes’ two-volume concordance, Rabelais does not come out so cleanly: merde, 0, but excrement(s), 11; bren, 1; (very famous) instances of chier, 2 (both in Book iii); cul, a mere 10. Concordance des Essais de Montaigne, eds. A.E. Leake, D.B. Leake, and R.E. Leake, 2 vols (Geneva: 1981). Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: 1968); Mikhaïl Bakhtin, L’ œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, trans. A. Robel (Paris: 1970). Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 370. A few such works to mention in passing: Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: 1978); Richard M. Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel (Lincoln, NE: 1986); Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: 1990).

the world in pantagruel’s gut

519

In the famous Gargantua 13 episode of the “torchecul” (“ass-wipe”), for example, the precocious five-year-old Gargantua impresses his doting father Grandgousier with his intellectual promise in flamboyantly unorthodox fashion. In response to a seemingly simple inquiry regarding the child’s hygiene: “—J’ ay (respondit Gargantua) par longue et curieuse experience inventé un moyen de me torcher le cul, le plus seigneurial, le plus excellent, le plus expedient que jamais feut veu.”12 No fewer than 58 empirical tests later—not to mention a poetic digression into the Marotic epigram and rondeau—the child prodigy arrives at the conclusion that the best ass-wipe is the down of a gosling (still attached): “pourveu qu’on luy tienne la teste entre les jambes.”13 For Bakhtin, who proceeds methodically through the materials thus employed by category as, he claims, does Rabelais, this “great inventory” results in a sort of inverted enlightenment. The grotesque parody, whether of poetic form, scholastic logic, or empiricism—all are accounted for, and more—demonstrates that the low becomes the source of the high. “The parody of the medieval topography is obvious,” as he similarly concludes in linking the Sibyl of Panzoust’s asshole and Proserpina’s close stool of Tiers Livre 22–23 to the ass-wipe of Gargantua 13: “the soul’s beatitude is deeply immersed in the body’s lowest stratum. Such is the conclusion of the downward thrust of all the images of this episode.”14 Rabelaisian scatology forms thus, for Bakhtin, “an organic part of a large and complex world of popular marketplace forms,” the wielding of which forms serve to counter a waning oppressive medieval hierarchy.15 In this, Bakhtin’s and Tetel’s readings unwittingly meet up, at least with regard to a crucial importance accorded to the scatological: for the former its association with the “material bodily lower stratum”—the microcosm’s anus, the macrocosm’s hell—heralds the death of an old order and the (re)birth of a new, which constitutes Rabelais’s seminal originality. For the latter, Rabelais’s unabashed use of scatological metaphor to both open, as it were, and close his chronicles, selfconsciously announces his poetic originality. As Frances A. Yates remarked already in an early review (1969) of the original English translation of Bakhtin, “this is an old book, and […] the author 12

13

14 15

G 13, 38; cw, 34: “ ‘I discovered,’ said Gargantua, ‘by long and painstaking experiments a way to wipe my ass, the most lordly, the most excellent, the most expedient that was ever seen.’ ” G 13, 41; cw, 37: “provided you hold his head between your legs.” Among various readings of this episode, see Donald Stone, “Ethical Patterns in Gargantua,” French Review 56.1 (1983): 10–13; François Rigolot, “Leda and the Swan: Rabelais’s Parody of Michelangelo,” rq 38.4 (Winter 1985): 688–700. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 378. Idem, 380.

520

persels

has not been in a position to keep abreast of the progress of Renaissance studies in general, and of Rabelais studies in particular, during the last quarter of a century.”16 For all its fruitful iconoclastic energy, Bakhtin was, indeed, unaware of the extensive rehabilitation of Rabelais as an evangelical humanist writer that eclipsed the “systematic rationalist atheist” model of Abel Lefranc, which Bakhtin himself was challenging, even as he devoted several pages to side-stepping the conclusions of the vanguard of that interpretive shift, Lucien Febvre.17 The latter’s 1942 Le problème de l’incroyance au xvie siècle: La religion de Rabelais, however methodical and persuasive its refutation of the charges of atheism with which Rabelais had come to be taxed, was taxed in turn by Bakhtin with ignoring folk or popular culture and the carnivalesque.18 Deaf to their regenerative laughter, dixit Bakhtin, Febvre misjudged not just Rabelais, whom Bakhtin characterized throughout his study as something of a liberation theologian avant la lettre, but the entire 16th century, in something of a fecal ferment that, like Gargamelle’s scatological delivery of Gargantua (G 6), would give birth to the modern. My purpose here is not to attempt to reconcile, or even merely rehearse, such currents and counter-currents of Rabelaisian scholarship—a herculean task, were it truly to be comprehensive—but rather to recall a few critical moments when Rabelaisian scatology came to the fore as potentially providing an interpretive key or keys to what Mireille Huchon, editor of the 1994 Pléiade Œuvres complètes, bluntly conceded (as if any attentive reader could ever pretend otherwise): “il est peu de textes aussi énigmatiques que l’ ensemble des chroniques gargantuines.”19 Buried deep in those enigmas, as so much manure at the root of the Pantagruelion, we might say, has ever been the problematic fecal matter. Tetel and Bakhtin, each in his own way, were among the first to turn over the (night)soil to study what juicy worms of wisdom it might produce. Traditional Rabelais exegesis has often confessed, explicitly or otherwise, to enjoying his scatological humor. By and large, however, it is treated as more or less extraneous “local color” the low comic byproduct, as it were, of a race, milieu et moment in which farce and fabliau flourished as readily as humanist eloquentia and copia, licensed, moreover, by the controlled nonconformity of satire, to which loose generic fraternity the chronicles both noisily and noi-

16 17 18 19

Frances A. Yates, “The Last Laugh,” The New York Review of Books (October 9, 1969). Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 131–136. Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’ incroyance au xvie siècle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris: 1942). Rabelais, oc, 1171. “There are few texts so enigmatic as the Gargantuan chronicles.”

the world in pantagruel’s gut

521

somely proclaim allegiance.20 For the sake of example, even the most generous readers of Rabelaisian “realism,” into which interpretive scheme scatology would seem to find a natural if not exactly a welcome home, have most often been at pains to accommodate it. A case in point: the influential classic essay by Erich Auerbach, at one time (and perhaps still) among the most widely consulted treatments of Rabelais by any reader venturing beyond the primary text, at least in Anglo-Saxon academies and classrooms, and to which this essay’s title obviously pays homage. “The World in Pantagruel’s Mouth,” chapter 11 of Auerbach’s Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, was translated into English as Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Willard R. Trask in 1953.21 Like Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, it is the fruit of wartime and earlier scholarship and thus tributary to the same assumptions regarding Lefranc’s “systematic rationalist atheist” Rabelais. The Pantagruel 32 anecdote on which Auerbach anchors his treatment of the “reality or super-reality” of Rabelais’s “Socratic buffoonery,” “Comment Pantagruel de la langue couvrit toute une armée, et de ce que l’ auteur veit dedans sa bouche,” affords Auerbach the critic’s ideal text, wherein a self-conscious narrator all but does the critic’s work for him.22 Here, as if knowing he would one day illustrate the point of a historical survey of mimetic texts, the “author” and narrator Alcofribas Nasier, à propos the similarities between his reality and that of the residents of Pantagruel’s mouth and throat, gamely calls it out to the reader: “—Jesus (dis je) il y a icy un nouveau monde.”23 Although far from the most scatological passage of the book, the episode does include the following exchange, over which Auerbach feels compelled to linger. Once Alcofribas has resurfaced after his unintentionally lengthy sojourn in the “new world” of his giant master’s mouth, with the wonders of which he has just regaled the reader, said master, Pantagruel, logically inquires: “Dont viens tu, Alcofrybas?” Je luy responds. “De vostre gorge, monsieur.” “Et despuis quand y es tu?” dist il. 20

21 22 23

For recent works on Rabelais as satirist, see especially Bernd Renner, “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’ Herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007) and as farceur, E. Bruce Hayes, Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais (Farnham: 2010). Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton: 1953). Auerbach, Mimesis, 284. P 32; 330. cw, 238: “How Pantagruel with his tongue covered a whole army, and what the author saw inside his mouth.” P 32, 331; cw, 239: “ ‘Jesus,’ said I, ‘then there’s a new world here?’”

522

persels

“Despuis” (dis je) “que vous alliez contre les Almyrodes.” “Il y a” (dist il) “plus de six moys. Et dequoy vivois tu? Que beuvoys tu?” Je responds. “Seigneur de mesmes vous, et des plus frians morceaulx qui passoient part vostre gorge j’en prenois le barraige.” “Voire mais” (dist il) “où chioys tu?” “En vostre gorge, Monsieur,” dis-je. “Ha, ha, tu es gentil compaignon” (dist il).24 While espousing a holistic approach to Rabelais or, rather, Rabelais’s own celebration of a holistic approach to life and its artistic representation (“As a part of nature, man rejoices in his breathing life, his bodily functions, and his intellectual powers”), Auerbach’s unease with the joy in said “bodily functions” is palpable.25 The term “creatural realism” (“kreatürlicher Realismus”) and variants pepper his reading and are evidently not always cause for unreserved embrace. He cannot seem to resist judgmental asides, whether sincere or merely pro forma, e.g. such characterizations as “grotesque cascade of words” (“groteske Wortkaskaden”); “coarse jokes” (“die groben Schwänke”).26 Rabelais tends to take a joke too far, “indeed, far beyond the limits of discretion and taste” (“weit über die Grenzen eines maßvollen Geschmacks”).27 “In Rabelais there is no aesthetic standard; everything goes with everything” (“Bei ihm gibt es kein ästhetisches Maß; alles verträgt sich mit allem”).28 As if in anticipation of Bakhtin, Auerbach seeks a context (and thus an excuse) for this lack of standards or discretion in contemporary “popular” genres, most interestingly “the late medieval mixture of styles” pragmatically cultivated by the medieval preacher who “mingles a formless plethora of erudition with coarse vulgarity” (“formlos aufgehäufte Gelehrsamkeit mit grober Volkstümlichkeit mischt”).29 He, too, must highlight the “long-winded account” of the infant Gargantua’s ass-wipe odyssey, but primarily to congratulate Rabelais on his gift of improvi-

24

25 26 27 28 29

P 32, 333; cw, 241: “ ‘Where are you coming from, Alcofribas?’ I answered him: ‘From your throat, sir.’ ‘And how long have you been there?’ said he. ‘Since you set out,’ said I, ‘against the Almyrodes.’ ‘That,’ said he, ‘is over six months ago. And what did you live on? What did you drink?’ I answered: ‘Lord, the same as you, and of the choicest morsels that passed down your throat I took my toll.’ ‘All right,’ said he, ‘but where did you shit?’ ‘In your throat, my Lord,’ said I. ‘Ha ha! You’re a jolly good fellow,’ said he.” Auerbach, Mimesis, 276. Idem, 274 and 275; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946; repr. Stuttgart: 1988), 261–262. (Emphases added.) Auerbach, Mimesis, 277; Dargestellte Wirklichkeit, 265. Auerbach, Mimesis, 278; Dargestellte Wirklichkeit, 265. Auerbach, Mimesis, 278; Dargestellte Wirklichkeit, 265.

523

the world in pantagruel’s gut

sation.30 He does not freight it with the disparate subversive or parodic designs Bakhtin and later critics will. Auerbach’s lingering discomfort with Rabelaisian scatology, despite his cautious willingness to incorporate the “material bodily lower stratum” into Rabelais’s “kreatürliche[n] Realismus” was long fairly representative, as noted earlier. For the sake of a second example, it is instructive to consider briefly an earlier, impressively comprehensive attempt to classify—the better to tame— the chronicles’ linguistic prolixity and diversity, Lazare Sainéan’s two-volume La Langue de Rabelais.31 As a philologist, he struggled to cultivate a scientific objectivity, all the while protecting both himself from potential charges of “non-scientific,” (merely) prurient, interest in Rabelais’s “nomenclature spéciale” as well as his reader from the possible shock of the raw (“cru”). To this end he lumped together somewhat indiscriminately and cordoned off behind a Latin chapter title (Erotica Verba) both the scatological and the potentially obscene, which, of course only served (and serves) to arouse the reader’s prurient curiosity all the more. The prefatory material, also as we might anticipate, is strewn with rhetorical distancing strategies, e.g. “La démarcation entre le physique et le moral, entre les nobles et les bas côtés de la nature humaine, n’était pas alors aussi rigoureuse que de nos jours.”32 It is, perhaps, too easy now to poke fun at the remains of the (misnamed) Victorian reserve that still troubled readers’ sensibilities in the 1920s. It is, however, worth noting that it kept Sainéan, and still too often keeps contemporary readers, from integrating the scatological into a variety of useful exegetical exercises and can still allow (even oblige) us to “pass over in silence” a sine qua non—or so Rabelais’s characters would have us believe—not just of human experience but also of early modern cosmography and thus meaning.

∵ Since the turn of the century, there has been new scholarly interest in the scatological, prompting groundbreaking research in the area of, to use a term coined as recently as 2008 by Susan Signe Morrison, fecopoetics. As a particu-

30 31

32

Auerbach, Mimesis, 273. Lazare Sainéan, La langue de Rabelais (Paris: 1922). Among more recent efforts to grapple with Rabelais’s “vulgarity” see Carol Clark, The Vulgar Rabelais (Vancouver: 1984) and, especially, the works of Barbara C. Bowen, e.g. Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Knoxville, TN: 1998). Sainéan, Langue, 293: “The dividing line between the physical and the moral, among nobles and the lower orders, was not then as clear as it is now.”

524

persels

larly vibrant subdivision of a broader field of critical inquiry that has come to be known as Waste Studies, it draws on a variety of disciplines, among which archeology, anthropology, sociology, history, cultural and literary studies, to focus essentially on the reconstitution of attitudes toward (human) waste as produced, managed, experienced, and valued (or not) by a given culture, in a given setting, at a given historical moment. An interpretation of Rabelaisian scatology would thus benefit from a sociohistorical, that is, fecopoetical understanding of the specific context in which a fictional character such as Panurge, say, beshits himself, as he does on more than one significant occasion in the Quart Livre. To borrow a phrase from the work of another of the field’s pioneers, Bourdieusian sociologist David Inglis, how can an appreciation of an early modern “fecal habitus” inform readings of the infant and adolescent Gargantua’s excremental pastimes? Or even, to lift a more prosaic formulation from David Praeger and Paul Provenza, was there a 16th-century “poop culture” that would enrich our understanding of Pantagruel’s epic bout of constipation, either as complement or foil to such previous studies as Tetel’s and Bakhtin’s?33 One very recent and particularly pertinent study illustrates the potential utility of this type of inquiry for the interpretation of Rabelais. Taking its cue most effectively from Morrison’s innovative consideration of medieval realities of and attitudes toward excrement, as well as from Caroline Bynum’s extensive work on the “‘radical physicality’ of medieval religion,” and taking into account current psychological, sociological and philosophical inquiry into notions of dirt and disgust, Martha Bayless’s Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine, “seeks to demonstrate […] the central role of filth and excrement in medieval religious thought.”34 To that end, she sifts a large and diverse corpus of primarily religious and moralizing texts in Latin and European vernaculars, in word as well as in image, all of which foreground to a revealing—and, as 33

34

See David Inglis, A Sociological History of Excretory Experience: Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technology (Lewiston, NY: 2001), and David Praeger and Paul Provenza, Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product (Los Angeles: 2007). Both are representative—the first a sociohistorical study of origins, the second a popular account of contemporary American attitudes—of a growing field, and the works referenced here are but a sampling devoted to the medieval and early modern periods. See especially Susan Signe Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (London: 2008) and The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter (London: 2015); Peter J. Smith, Between Two Stools: Scatology and Its Representations in English Literature, Chaucer to Swift (Manchester, UK: 2012); Jeffery C. Persels and Russell Ganim (eds.), Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology (Farnham, UK: 2004). Martha Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine (London: 2011), 65, xviii.

the world in pantagruel’s gut

525

she notes, for modern sensibilities, astonishing—degree the virtual ubiquity of filth, excrement in particular, as serious trope for the representation of the corruption of the human condition. “The body,” her study argues persuasively, “was essential to the understanding of sin, and excrement was essential to an understanding of the way sin afflicted the body.”35 There is, alas, no Bakhtinian redemption implied: only the low is in the low, and humanity’s daily defecatory struggles remind us of that and only that. To ground her argument, she devotes an entire chapter to a survey of the “material realities” of human waste production and processing across the social classes (29–64), with examples drawn from various primary documentary sources as well as from the growing number of studies of historical sanitation, providing rich context not only for her specific cast of theologians to mine but also for any fictional representation of those realities.36 Moreover, as her subtitle insists, the association of excrement with the devil was deep-rooted in the verbal and visual tropes of medieval Christianity: fecal matter and its stench were his and his minions’ icons or vade mecum, as it were. Although, in curiously blinkered fashion, concerning said fictions, she ultimately contends that “comic or more playful works […], typically do not have overt moral or pedagogical aims,” she does allow that “this does not mean they participate in a different worldview.”37 What matters most is that recent contributions to Waste Studies such as Bayless’s encourage altered perspectives on Rabelais’s “material realities,” especially with regard to his employment and enjoyment of a fecopoetics or an ars scatologica: the world(view) in Pantagruel’s gut.

1

Pantagruel (1532)

A couple of decades ago, some years before the rise of Waste Studies proper, I proposed a not-unrelated scatological reading of the first-published of the chronicles, one which associated aspects of contemporary (to Rabelais) medical and religious documents and traditions.38 It was an attempt to detect a coherent pattern in the peculiar series of fecal and urinary ‘malfunctions’ that punctuate the chronicle of the birth, progress, and triumph of the work’s epony-

35 36 37 38

Bayless, Sin and Filth, 117. Bayless, Sin and Filth, 29–64. Bayless, Sin and Filth, 165. Persels, “ ‘Straitened in the bowels’ or, Concerning the Rabelaisian Trope of Defecation,” in Actes des conférences du cycle “Rabelais et la nature” organisé durant l’année 1994, ed. F. Metivier, (er) 31 (1996): 101–112.

526

persels

mous hero, the better to salvage the scatological for the greater evangelical humanist “design” Edwin Duval had then but recently articulated.39 Essentially, as integration of subsequent research into medieval fecopoetics such as that just sampled would only confirm, the comic episodes of constipation and/or diarrhea (e.g. the Limousin school boy of Pantagruel 6, the judges and university regents of the Baisecul and Humevesne case of Pantagruel 10, Thaumaste in Pantagruel 19, the giant who threatens to make a suppository of Carpalim in Pantagruel 29) represent literal and metaphorical purges that prepare the way of Pantagruel. This seems most explicitly to be the case with Thaumaste, who recognizes the (greater than) Solomonic wisdom of the young giant only after a humiliating defeat at the hands (quite literally) of Panurge, involving a spectacular progressive loss of bowel control: Thaumaste de grand hahan se leva, mais en se levant fist un gros pet de boulangier: car le bran vint aprés et pissa vinaigre bien fort, et puoit comme tous les diables, les assistans commencerent se estouper les nez, car il se conchioit de angustie, …40 Once such diverse members of the body politic are cleansed, it is logically the turn of its prince, fresh from and flush with victory over the bestial Loupgarou, yet another metaphorical purging. Pantagruel’s very body, which, as Alcofribas on his detour has already “discovered,” contains a “new world” (P 32), sickens in both bladder and bowels, requiring a fantastical but successful purgative intervention. Thus, is the brave new Pantagrueline Utopia restored to health and equilibrium on all literal and figurative levels. As “creaturely” playful as the recourse to what seems a running scatological gag is, it is far from extraneous to integrated readings of the chronicles. Rabelais’s clever, sustained manipulation of pre-existing scatological motifs, e.g. the entrenched medieval associations between feces and sin as elucidated by Bayless, anchors the work in contemporary discourse on the body and its functions, even (or especially) the basest. Where Bakhtin sees regenerative subversive laughter, there is, rather, 39

40

See Edwin M. Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven: 1991), to which the following remarks concerning the work are now, as then, heavily indebted. More recently on Rabelais’s evangelism, particularly its reflection in the language of the chronicles, see Isabelle Garnier-Mathez, “Langue et intertextualité: La qualification adjectivale, signe de connivence évangélique chez Rabelais,” in La langue de Rabelais et la langue de Montaigne. Actes du Colloque de Rome, septembre 2003, ed. F. Giacone, (er) 48 (Geneva: 2009), 93–114. P 19, 288; cw, 200: “Thaumaste, with a great effort, got up, but in getting up he let a great baker’s fart, and he stank like all the devils in hell. The spectators started stopping up their noses, for he was beshitting himself in his perplexity.”

the world in pantagruel’s gut

527

equally potent restorative conservative mirth: order in the gut equals order in the realm, microcosmic digestive health mimics the macrocosmic, and vice versa.

2

Gargantua (1535)

Ignoring the prompts of long-established editorial tradition, there is value to reading the chronicles in order of publication rather than in order of the fictional dynastic chronology. Theses regarding the story of the father being in some respects an expanded reworking, for whatever reasons, of the story of the son are not without merit. From a scatological perspective, indeed, Gargantua complements as much as it replicates the patterns established in Pantagruel. Exploitation of the excremental is more explicitly and consistently developmental, even evolutionary: up from shit, as it were, starting with Gargantua’s famously fecal birth (G 6), inter faeces et urinam. Subsequently, the infancy chapters are most heavily stained with bodily fluids and solids: “il se conchioit à toutes heures: car il estoit merveilleusement phlegmaticque des fesses”; “Il pissoit sus ses souliers, il chyoit en sa chemise, il se mouschoyt à ses manches, il mourvoit dedans sa soupe”; “Souvent crachoyt en bassin, pettoyt de gresse, pissoyt contre le soleil”; “Escorchait le renard,” “Mangeoyt chous et chioyt pourrée”; and on through the infantile jokes of Gargantua 12, all of it leading directly, perhaps inevitably, to the paternally admired invention of the perfect ass-wipe (G 13).41 Without diminishing its much-studied verbal richness and formal complexity, it serves in this current scheme chiefly to mark a stage in Gargantua’s “civilizing process.”42 If his delight in the “material bodily lower stratum” yet dominates, his concern has shifted, dare we say matured, to the best way to wipe up after it, indicating growing mastery of multiple forms, not just linguistic, rhetorical, and poetic, but especially his own physical one and those of the social conventions governing excretion. This will, of course, only be completed by subsequent formal training. Small wonder, then, 41

42

G 7, 23; cw, 21: “he beshat himself all the time, for he was wonderfully phlegmatic in the buttocks”; G 11, 34. cw 30: “He pissed on his shoes, shat in his shirt, blew his nose on his sleeves, sniveled in his soup,” “often spat in the basin, farted for fat, pissed against the sun,” “flayed the fox” (i.e., vomited), “ate cabbage and shat leeks.” The term, of course, is owing to sociologist Norbert Elias’s 1939 classic two-volume Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation (Basel: 1939), which appeared in English as The Civilizing Process (Oxford: 1969). His study, grounded in a psychoanalytically-influenced review of what he considers the late medieval and early modern invention of etiquette, provides the fundamental critical vocabulary for any subsequent treatment.

528

persels

that the first, failed Holofernian curriculum is characterized by digestive and excremental excess: Puis fiantoit, pissoyt, rendoyt sa gorge, rottoit, pettoyt, baisloyt, crachoyt, toussoyt, sangloutoyt, esternouoit, et se morvoyt en archidacre, et desjeunoyt pour abatre la rouzée et maulvais aer: belles tripes frites, belles charbonnades, beaulx jambons, belles cabirotades, et force soupes de prime.43 as well as, in accordance with humanist stereotype of scholastics, lack of attention to external hygiene: “aprés se peignoit du peigne de Almain, c’ estoit des quatre doigtz et le poulce. Car ses precepteurs disoient, que soy aultrement pigner, laver, et nettoyer, estoit perdre temps en ce monde.”44 Small wonder, again, that the new Ponocratian regime must needs begin with a ‘canonical’ purge, of hellebore, one targeting specifically mental filth (G 23, 64), and that in short order Gargantua achieves complete mastery of the excretory process, onto which has (at last!) been imposed a measure of post-lapsarian shame, with respect to the time (morning only), the place, and even the description of the act proper: “Puis alloit es lieux secretz faire excretion des digestions naturelles. Là son precepteur repetoit ce que avoit esté leu: luy exposant les poinctz plus obscurs et difficiles.”45 Small wonder, finally, that henceforth the scatological will play a sharply diminished role in the life of the fully formed Christian humanist prince. Indeed, with the exception of Gargantua’s pre-prandial piss (G 38), scatological episodes, here as in the successive adventures of his son, involve other characters. This fact is of considerable significance. As Gargantua 38’s “lapse” demonstrates, the joke has not grown stale, rather it no longer corresponds to the role the giants are destined to play in the greater redemptive scheme of the chronicles. In terms of a comprehensive fecopoetics or ars scatologica, Gargantua is thus in perfect sync with its sequel, Pantagruel. In distinctive but complementary fashion, their respective heroes are formed, that is 43

44

45

G 21, 56; cw, 49: “Then he crapped, pissed, threw up, belched, yawned, farted, spat, coughed, sobbed, sneezed, blew his nose like an archdeacon, and ate breakfast to put down the bad air: fine fried tripes, beautiful carbonadoes, fair hams, fine game stews, and many early morning dips as snacks.” G 21, 56; cw, 49: “after that he combed his hair with Almain’s comb, that was, the four fingers and the thumb, for his tutors said that to comb one’s hair, wash, and clean up any other way, was to waste time in this world.” G 23, 65 (emphasis added); cw, 55: “Then he went to the private places to make an excretion of natural digestions. There his preceptor repeated what had been read, expounding to him the most obscure and difficult points.”

the world in pantagruel’s gut

529

trained, educated out of incontinence, as it were, and into constitutional control, whether that constitution is that of the body or of the body politic. But that formation has substantial religious implications as well, and not just in terms of an overarching medieval catholicity, such as that spelled out by Bayless. Rabelais’s progressive distancing—but not exile—of his characters from the “material bodily lower stratum” does purposefully set them apart from the average sinner, as befitting their elevated status and the roles they are called on to play as rulers of men and temporal representatives of divine power, not to mention temporal enforcers of divine order. But within the context of the gathering storm of confessional conflict, which the fully authentic chronicles foreshadow but will not witness, Rabelaisian scatology is famously partisan. In many ways, the (covert) expression of his evangelical humanism is most richly served by it: representatives of the old, Sorbonnic order throughout the chronicles are ever linked to ingestive and digestive extremes even as the giants necessarily leave them behind. And not just the giants: it is perhaps worth noting that there are no latrines mentioned in the blueprints for Thélème, and that, moreover, the final impression of the utopian community’s accommodations we are left with is decidedly sweet-smelling:46 A l’issue des salles du logis des dames estoient les parfumeurs et testonneurs, par les mains desquelz passoient les hommes quand ilz visitoient les dames. Iceulx fournissoient par chascun matin les chambres des dames, d’eau rose, d’eau de naphe, et d’eau d’ ange, et à chascune la precieuse cassollette vaporante de toutes drogues aromatiques.47 This elaborate distancing from the “material bodily lower stratum” and its base requirements is only enhanced by the sartorial splendor of the following chapter (G 56). Hell stinks, but every measure will be taken to ensure that Thélème does not, either physically or, as the rigorous entrance requirements have also made manifest, genetically and morally.

46 47

On actual monastery latrines and plans for same, see Bayless, Sin and Filth, 46–50. G 55, 145; cw, 124: “At the exits of the public rooms of the ladies’ lodgings were the perfumers and hairdressers, through whose hands the men passed when they went to visit the ladies. Each morning these furnished the ladies’ chambers with rose water, orangeflower water, and myrtle water, and each lady with a precious casket breathing forth every kind of aromatic drugs.”

530 3

persels

Le Tiers Livre (1546)

Not unlike the proverbial cock who defends his manure pile, it is Panurge who extends the ars scatologica into the Tiers Livre and beyond, as is fitting for the unregenerate character most resistant to the stoic moderation of pantagruelism, which receives its fullest articulation in Tiers Livre 2 and 7: “—Je ne pensoys (dist Pantagruel) jamais rencontrer home tant obstiné à ses apprehensions comme je vous voy.”48 It is this resistance, of course, which prompts the diverse oracle-consulting expeditions of the remaining chronicles. Pantagruel has retained Ponocrates’s lessons and rises above the mire—physically, morally, even lexically, as in Gargantua 23, cited above—in which the Panurgian everyman or every sinner remains.49 The (relatively rare) instances of scatological rhetoric in the Tiers Livre—it is the installment least marked by excrement of any sort—consequently come out of the mouth of Panurge, and most often in logorrheic torrent. For example, when Pantagruel forgives his debts, to which generosity Panurge responds, as if forgiven his sins, with devotion owing rather to God, (and asking to keep a few, just the same): Ce n’est là que me deult, ce n’est là que me cuist et demange. Car dorenavent estant quitte quelle contenence auray je? Croiez que je auray maulvaise grace pour les premiers moys, veu que je n’y suis ne nourry ne accoustumé. J’en ay grand paour. D’adventaige desormais ne naistra ped en tout Salmiguondinoys, qui ne ayt son renvoy vers mon nez. Tous les peteurs du monde petans disent. ‘Voy là pour les quittes.’ Ma vie finira bien toust, je le prævoy. Je vous recommande mon Epitaphe. Et mourray tout confict en pedz. Si quelque jour pour restaurant à faire peter les bonnes femmes, en extreme passion de colicque venteuse, les medicamens ordinaires ne satisfont aux medicins, la momie de mon paillard et empeté corps leurs sera remede præsent. En prenant tant peu que direz, elles peteront plus qu’ilz n’entendent. C’est pourquoy je vous prirois voluntiers que de debtes me laissez quelque centurie: (…)50 48 49

50

tl 21, 415; cw, 317: “ ‘I never thought,’ said Pantagruel, ‘I’d meet a man as obstinate in his preconceptions as I see you are’.” The “évaluation morale du personnage de Panurge,” as a recent scholar to devote an entire book to him, Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, phrases it, is as substantial as it is divergent. He has generated perhaps more analysis than any other individual character of the chronicles. For a review of approaches to him, including an extensive bibliography, see her Panurge comme lard en pois: Paradoxe, scandale et propriété dans le Tiers livre, (er) 53 (Geneva: 2013). tl 5, 369; cw, 274–275: “That’s not what bothers me, that’s not what irks and gripes me. For

the world in pantagruel’s gut

531

His “lousy befarted body,” despite its homeopathic promise for colicky women, i.e., suffering from “painfull windinesse in the stomacke, or entrails” (Cotgrave), stands in direct opposition to the voided body of the repentant sinner. Repentance, or lack thereof, as played out scatologically in Pantagruel’s run of colonic cleanses, returns to the fore in a second example. In Tiers Livre 21, well into the series of consultations, Pantagruel proposes a visit to the poet Raminagrobis, who is “en l’article et dernier moment de son decés.”51 As the seemingly extraneous reference to the poet’s progeny, “la belle Bazoche” / “the fair Bazoche” might prepare them, the petitioners are in for a farcical mise en scène, specifically, a rich parody of the medieval tradition of the ars bene moriendi. Most familiar to late medieval audiences via widely-disseminated graphic illustrations, this abridgement of an anonymous reworking of a treatise on dying by University of Paris Chancellor Jean Gerson (1363–1429), “staged” the preparation for that most terrible penultimate event, the death of the body, which provided the last chance to prepare for the ultimate event, the survival or (God forbid) the death of the soul. The stations of the agon were five, played out in the bedchamber, during which demons pitched a final series of skirmishes over the possession of the soul, appealing in turn to the dying man’s doubt, despair, impatience, vanity, and avarice. The goal was, of course, the definitive triumph of Christ, his crucified body perfectly aligned with the ascending soul of the dying man, the forces of the church arranged in splendor above, the teethgnashing, tongue-gnawing vanquished demons grouped helpless below, their furious defeat normally inscribed on both faces and phylacteries, their limbs grotesquely splayed and their anuses grossly displayed, the repentant sinner but narrowly escaping the varied gaping orifices of hell.

51

from now on, being quit, what face am I going to wear? Believe me, I’ll look bad for the first months, seeing that I’m neither trained nor accustomed to it. I’m very much afraid so. Besides, from now on not a fart will be born in all Salmagundi that won’t get sent back to my nose. All the farting farters in the world say: ‘That’s for the quit!’ My life will soon end, I foresee it. And I’ll die all pickled in farts. If some day as a restorative for farting for good women suffering acutely from windy colic the doctors are not satisfied with the ordinary medicament, the mummy of my lousy befarted body will be a remedy at hand for them. By taking the least little bit of it, they will fart more than they understand. That’s why I would like to ask you to leave me some hundred-odd debts (…)” On associations between farting and the devil as well as a definitive study on flatulence in medieval literature, see Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (London: 2010). tl 21, 416; cw, 318: “at death’s door and in the final moments of his decease.”

532

persels

The petitioners find Raminagrobis, however, “en agonie, avecques maintien joyeulx, face ouverte, et reguard lumineux.”52 Once he has scrawled out Panurge’s requested marriage forecast, the poet dismisses the company with finality, noting that he has just managed to rid himself of “un tas de villaines, immondes, et pestilentes bestes, noires, guarres, fauves, blanches, cendrées, grivolées: les quelles laisser ne me vouloient à mon aise mourir,” that is, the church brethren come to perform the last rights and usher Raminagrobis through the final earthly struggle.53 In an evangelical about-face, Raminagrobis claims to have no need of them, “jà touchant et goustant le bien, et felicité, que le bon Dieu a præparé à ses fideles et esleuz.”54 This flouting of orthodox convention is an immediate source of eschatological terror for Panurge—“ ‘Je croy par la vertus Dieu qu’il est Hæreticque, ou je me donne au Diable’” (tl 22, 418; cw, 319: “‘I do believe […] that he’s a heretic, or devil take me!’ ”)—and he condemns it in no uncertain scatological terms: Son ame s’en va à trente mille charrettées de Diables. Sçavez vous où? Cor Bieu mon amy droict dessoubs la scelle persée de Proserpine, dedans le propre bassin infernal, on quel elle rend l’operation fecale de ses clysteres, à cousté guausche de la grande chauldiere, à trois toises prés les gryphes de Lucifer, tirant vers la chambre noire de Demiourgon. Ho le villain.55 In terms smelling strongly of farce, e.g. Andrieu de la Vigne’s 1496 Farce du meunier de qui le diable emporte l’âme en enfer, a reworking of Rutebeuf’s 13th-century fabliau, which features Proserpina, among other denizens of an elaborately excremental underworld and involved in a plot that is a blatant parody of the ars bene moriendi, Panurge associates evangelical heresy with shit.56

52 53 54 55

56

tl 21, 416–417; cw, 318: “in the death throes with joyful bearing, open face, and luminous glance.” tl 21, 417; cw, 319: “a bunch of ugly, filthy, pestilential creatures, black, piebald, tawny, white ashen, speckled, which would not let me die in peace and comfort.” tl 21, 417–418; cw, 319: “[having] already touched and tasted, the bliss and felicity that the good God has prepared for His faithful and elect.” tl 22, 420; cw, 321: “ ‘His soul is flying off to thirty thousand cartloads of devils. Do you know where to? ‘Odsbody, my friend, right beneath Proserpina’s toilet seat, inside the chamber pot where she delivers the fecal product of her enemas, on the left side of the great cauldron, just three fathoms from Lucifer’s claws on the way toward the black chamber of Demogorgon. O the wretch!’ ” Farce of the Miller Whose Soul the Devil Carries Off to Hell. The correspondences between Rabelais and de la Vigne are both numerous and striking. For the full text of the farce,

the world in pantagruel’s gut

533

This is entirely consonant with the ars scatologica as practiced in the first two installments of the chronicles. As Panurge digs himself in deeper, so to speak, he becomes both the principal repository and generator of an excremental invective—frequently accompanied by references to the devil—that both sets him at odds with pantagrueline evangelical humanism and provides Rabelais with a useful (potty)mouthpiece for attacking his orthodox critics. Panurge as defender of Catholic practice is as comical as it is potent: the man who obstinately interprets all manner of oracular texts “au rebours” (“in reverse,” as Frame translates it, but Cotgrave enriches further: “arseward, backward, preposterously, oblikely, awry, overthwartly, quite contrary, full against the course,” etc.) as guardian of the sacred truths. What is in the heart, not to mention the stomach, bowels, and even mucus membranes, of Panurge will come out in spectacular, protracted and repetitive manner on the voyage of the Quart Livre. Before embarking on the Thalamège, however, one last example to emphasize yet again the continuity of Rabelais’s use of excremental metaphor, this one involving the anti-monk Frere Jan, among the most faithful disciples of Pantagruel and one who in many ways embodies an exaggeratedly healthy appetite and digestion. Through him passes Rabelais’s prodigious stock of anti-clerical medieval jokes concerning the paradoxically earthy appetites of spiritual mediators. If, like his brethren, he enjoys, he is not enslaved. He mocks indulgently the fact that his brethren “ne mangent mie pour vivre, ilz vivent pour manger, et ne ont que leur vie en ce monde.”57 But this (self-)mockery actually affirms and defends the pantagrueline order, as will throughout the chronicles his function as miles christianus (with a comic touch of the gloriosus). That order is reflected in his one extended scatological riff, on monastic hours: Car les bons peres de religion par certaine Caballisticque institution des anciens, non escripte, mais baillée de main en main, soy levans, de mon temps, pour matines, faisoient certains præambules notables avant entrer en l’eclise. Fiantoient aux fiantouoirs, pissoient aux pissouoirs, crachoient aux crachouoirs, toussoient aux toussouoirs melodieusement, resvoient aux resvoirs, affin de rien immonde ne porter au service divin. Ces choses faictes, devotement se transportoient en la saincte Chapelle (ainsi estoit en leur Rebus nommée la cuisine claustrale) et devotement sollici-

57

see André Tissier (ed.), Recueil de farces (1450–1550), vol. 4 (Geneva: 1989). See also Noah D. Guynn, Pure Filth. Ethics, Politics and Religion in Early French Farce (Philadelphia: 2020). tl 15, 399; cw, 302: “hardly at all eat to live, they live to eat, and have only their life in this world.”

534

persels

toient que dés lors feust au feu le beuf mis pour le desjeuner des religieux freres de nostre Seigneur. Eulx mesmes souvent allumoient le feu soubs la marmite.58 Sleep, purge, pray, eat [repeat]. Yet Frere Jan (not unlike Rabelais himself), has broken out of this cloistered cycle. His prowess in the Picrocholine War; his founding of—but not residence in—the Abbaye de Thélème; his travels with Pantagruel and Panurge, to both of whom he renders sage advice and useful service, all make of him a very engaged and useful friar, one who controls his bodily functions all the while rejoicing in them as well as manipulating them to reinforce Rabelais’s satirical intent. Here, the ritualized, hasty pre-service monastic purge of “immonde” / “foul” physical and spiritual matter, which Frere Jan sets apart as “de mon temps” / “of my time” and in the imperfect, leads to a similarly imperfect end, at least from a soteriological perspective. The mass is hastily dispatched—“ces choses faictes” / “these things done”—the more swiftly to swap the spiritual nourishment of the Eucharist with the (more satisfying) carnal feast. Frere Jan’s (former) brethren remain mired in the corporeal. Such embryonic, confessionally polemical potshots will only mature in the Quart Livre.

4

Le Quart Livre (1548–1552)

Panurge has two evangelically charged excremental star turns in the Quart Livre, both of which perpetuate the themes established in the preceding installments and fulfill the hermeneutic promise of Rabelais’s ars scatologica. In the epic storm that rages through Quart Livre 18–22, he first vomits: Panurge ayant du contenu en son estomach bien repeu les poissons scatophages, restoit acropy sus le tillac tout affligé, tout meshaigne, et à demy

58

tl 15, 398; cw, 303: “For the good religious fathers, by a certain cabalistic institution of the ancients, not written, but passed down from hand to hand, in my time, on rising for matins, performed certain notable preambles before entering the church: they crapped in the crapperies, pissed in the pisseries, spat in the spitteries, coughed melodiously in the cougheries, daydreamed in the daydreameries, so as not to bring anything foul into the divine service. These things done, they piously betook themselves into the holy chapel [saincte chapelle]—thus in their lingo was named the claustral kitchens—and piously urged that the beef be put on the fire for the breakfast of the monks, brothers of our Lord. They themselves often lit the fire beneath the cooking pot.”

the world in pantagruel’s gut

535

mort, invocqua tous les benoistz saincts et sainctes à son ayde, protesta de soy confesser en temps et lieu, puys s’escria en grand effroy …59 then bawls like a baby and soils himself: “Par ma foy j’ ay belle paour. Bou bou, bou bous bous. C’est faict de moy. Je me conchie de male raige de paour. Bou bou, bou bou.”60 In the midst of which outpourings he suffers the verbal slings and arrows of Frere Jan, who, true to form, evinces no patience for this “pleurart de merde” (585) at a time of existential crisis when what is needed is action. Only when the danger has passed does Panurge regain sufficient self-control to make a show of pitching in, even mocking Frere Jan for doing nothing while he, Panurge, sweats in assisting the sailors. When accused of having yielded to fear during the storm, he denies it. As Frere Jan will say of him much later, anticipating the book’s closing episode: “Ce Diable de fol est si lasche et meschant, qu’il se conchie à toutes heurtes de male raige de paour.”61 Panurge’s rambling, passively self-pitying prayer and lament, punctuated by evacuation from all orifices, is also stippled with revealing Catholic ‘superstitions,’ e.g. petitions to the holy Virgin, and appeals: “Pleust à Dieu que præsentement je feusse dedans la Orque des bons et beatz peres Concilipetes les quelz ce matin nous rencontrasmes, tant devotz, tant gras, tant joyeulx, tant douilletz.”62 This stands in pointed contrast to Pantagruel’s efficient entreaty for help to “grand Dieu Servateur,” prior to actively throwing his back into the survival effort.63 His subsequent refusal to acknowledge his physical and verbal manifestation of the fear that “marked” him scatologically leaves him alone among the fellow voyagers and followers of Pantagruel, for his lack of faith. Likewise, his expressed wish at the height of the storm to be able to jump ship and join the monks on their way to the Council of Chesil [Trent], the sighting of whose 59

60 61 62 63

ql 18, 582; cw, 478: “Panurge, having well fed the scatophagous fishes with the contents of his stomach, remained squarring on deck, all upset, all beat, and half dead: invoked all the blessed saints, men and women to his aid; vowed he would make confession at some time and place, when in great terror cried out (…)” ql 18, 583; cw, 478: “ ‘My faith, I really am scared. Bou bou, bou bous bous! I’m beshitting myself in a frenzy of panic fear. Bou bou, bou bou!’ ” ql 66, 696; cw, 588: “ ‘This devil of a lunatic is such a lousy coward that he shits in his pants again and again in a sheer frenzy of panic fear.’ ” ql 19, 584; cw, 479: “ ‘Would God I were right now in the transport we met this morning with the good blessed concilipetic fathers, so plump, so cheery, so sleek and gracious.’” ql 19, 584; cw, 479: “Great God the Savior.” This juxtaposition echoes that of Pantagruel and Panurge’s respective prayers in Pantagruel. For a contrastive reading in terms of evangelical Christianity, see Duval, The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, 88–92. Also, editor Mireille Huchon’s note regarding the evangelical nuances of “grand Dieu Servateur” and like terms, oc, 1411–1412, page 426, n. 8.

536

persels

ships (ql 18) had caused him wild joy whereas Pantagruel knew it to be rather a sign of impending storms, literal and figurative. Panurge’s double-ended purge has no lasting effect, leads to no cleansing of popish devotion. Logically enough, this reaction is repeated in the book’s closing chapter: “Comment Panurge par male paour se conchia, et du grand chat Rodilardus pensoit que feust un Diableteau.”64 Frere Jan’s prank to scare Panurge by firing the ship’s canon has the expected result: fearing the fires of hell, Panurge rushes up from the hold in a spectacular state of disarray, the stench of which is readily apparent to Frere Jan: Frere Jan à l’approcher sentoit je ne sçay quel odeur aultre que de la pouldre à canon. Dont il tira Panurge en place, et apperceut que sa chemise estoit toute foyreuse et embrenée de frays. La vertus retentrice du nerf qui restrainct le muscle nommé Sphincter (c’est le trou du cul) estoit dissolue par la vehemence de paour qu’il avoit eu en ses phantasticques visions. Adjoinct le tonnoirre de telles canonnades: lequel plus est horrificque par les chambres basses que n’est sus le tillac. Car un des symptomes et accidens de paour est, que par luy ordinairement se ouvre le guischet du serrail on quel est à temps la matiere fecale retenue.65 This observation prompts the longest scatological riff of the chronicles since Gargantua’s invention of the perfect ass-wipe (G 13), including two separate anecdotes regarding the efficacy of fear as a cure for constipation. The sight and smell of Panurge in this sorry state elicits laughter from Pantagruel as well as his final words (and counsel) of the book: “Allez, dist Pantagruel, allez de par Dieu, vous estuver, vous nettoyer, vous asceurer, prendre chemise blanche, et vous revestir.”66 This is but a figural rendering of the advice Pantagruel has been giving all along: clean up your physical and spiritual act, cleanliness is

64 65

66

ql 67, 697–701; cw, 589–592: “How Panurge beshat himself in panic fear and thought the great cat Rodilardus was a devilkin.” ql 67, 698; cw, 590: “Frère Jean on approaching him smelled I know not what odor other than that of canon powder. He pulled Panurge out into the open and perceived that his smock was all crapped on and newly beshitten. The retentive power of the nerve that controls the muscle called sphincter (that’s the asshole) was dissolved by the violence of the fear that he had had in his fantasy visions, besides the thunder of the cannonades, which is more horrific in the lower quarters than it is on deck. For one of the symptoms and accidents of fear is that by it is ordinarily opened the wicket of the seraglion in which for a time the fecal matter is contained.” ql 67, 700; cw, 592: “ ‘Go along,’ said Pantagruel, ‘go along, in God’s name, and take a bath, clean up, get hold of yourself, put on a clean white shirt and get dressed again.’”

the world in pantagruel’s gut

537

next to godliness. Said advice Panurge, significantly, does not heed, at least not before the book ends on a final au rebours of sorts, in the closing passage cited at the opening of this essay: his denial that he is afraid, and his contention that the “turds, crap, droppings, shit, stool, elimination, fecal matter, excrement, fumets, leavings, scybale, spyrathe” with which he is bespattered and the stench of which cause Frere Jan to hold his nose, is in actuality “Hibernian saffron.” This claim to a possibly (purposely?) mythically-origined version of the otherwise expensive commodity which produces a brownish-yellow dye comically reminiscent of diarrhea stains is obviously meant to invert the scale of values, thus reinforcing Panurge’s denial.67 He remains unregenerate to the very end, visibly and malodorously mired in (his own) filth. The Quart Livre is famous for much more epically scaled examples of excremental metaphor, scattered among the Thalamège’s various fantastical ports of call, most notably l’isle de Tapinois (29–32), l’ isle des Papimanes (48–54), and especially Messere Gaster (57–62). As objects of curiosity, consternation, pity, derision, and even violence, the fantastical indigenous peoples, creatures, and animated allegorical constructs encountered are each worthy of extended treatment in terms of any ars scatologica. However, they can also be usefully considered in the aggregate as constituent parts of an overarching polemical discourse, one presaged by Frere Jan’s gentle anti-clerical mockery of Tiers Livre 15, discussed above. The word polemic is key, for what has happened since the first two installments in the Gargantuan chronicles, that is since the early 1530s, gradually, then with increasing virulence, is the confessional polarization that will break out in ferocious physical expression in the Wars of Religion (1562–1598), which Rabelais will not live to witness, of course, but which the Quart Livre, in particular, foresees and, one could argue, even stages in advance. Rabelais’s chronicles will, in fact, prove to be something of a tropic gold mine, that is, the rhetorical figures he exploits will become, mutatis mutandis, the staples of the subsequent flood of Calvinist vernacular critique, both satirical and sincere, of the Roman and Gallican church failings, abuses and excesses, real, exaggerated, or even merely imagined.68 67 68

Crocus sativus is not known to have been cultivated as far north as Ireland, although the associated color has a long history in Irish textiles. On this topic, see Persels, “ ‘The Mass and the Fart are Sisters’: Scatology and Calvinist Rhetoric against the Mass, 1560–63,” in Fecal Matters, 38–55, and “Cooking with the Pope: the Language of Food and Protest in Calvinist and Catholic Polemic from the 1560s,” Mediaevalia 22 (1999): 30–53. For more general studies of dominant tropes in Calvinist and Catholic polemic, see Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: 1999); Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French

538

persels

It is within this context that the Cinquiesme Livre can fruitfully be considered. Although not without grist fit for scatological milling, e.g. the anecdote concerning the Abbé de Castillier’s ped de la mort or death fart (cl 16), its uncertain composition, together with a posthumous piecemeal publication that spans the first War of Religion, invites separate consideration. As just noted, Rabelaisian tropes were frequently repurposed, and most often rendered decidedly less nuanced, in all grades of confessional polemic through the 1590s, many of which Rabelais himself had merely recycled from pre-existing anticlerical critique. It would make more sense to study those of the Cinquiesme Livre against the backdrop of the increasingly confrontational works of its cohort, many of which are also of uncertain parentage. “Or, quoi qu’ on en pense,” Richard Cooper concluded provisionally in the introduction to the most ambitious and comprehensive meeting of minds over the work to date, “le Cinquiesme livre de 1564 est un texte authentique du seizième siècle écrit dans le sillage de Rabelais, qui prolonge une réflexion sur certains de ses grands thèmes.”69

∵ This concise review of scatological episodes makes no claim to exhaustiveness, as is readily evident. Nor is it meant to preclude other interpretations, complementary or contradictory. One path not taken here, for instance, is the pattern of recurring references to the therapeutic qualities of excrement, Rabelais’s passing nods to the Dreckapotheke or “filth pharmacy” tradition in medieval European medicine. An example of this surfaces in the Dindenault episode, Quart Livre 7, in reference to the wondrous byproducts of the merchant’s sheep: “De leurs crottes (mais qu’il ne vous desplaise) les medicins de nos pays guerissent soixante et dixhuict especes de maladie.”70 Also, the healing virtues of Pantagruel’s urine, etiologically pooled into hot springs as a testament to the giant prince’s thaumaturgic powers (P 33). And the Briefve declaration’s attribution of the epithet “maschemerdes” (“crapcrunchers”) to physicians rather than

69

70

Wars of Religion (Farnham: 2002); Frank Lestringant, Une sainte horreur ou le voyage en eucharistie (Geneva: 1996). Richard Cooper, “L’authenticité du Cinquiesme Livre: État présent de la question,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone, (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 9–22 (21): “But whatever one thinks of it, the 1564 Fifth Book is an authentic work of the 16th century, written in Rabelais’s wake, one which prolongs reflection on a number of his great themes.” ql 7, 552; cw, 451: “From their turds (begging your pardon) the doctors of our countries cure seventy-eight kinds of illnesses.”

the world in pantagruel’s gut

539

to priests, as it is in Gargantua 40: “par ce qu’ilz mangent la merde du monde, c’est à dire les pechez, et comme mache-merdes.”71 Yet another path would be an investigation of early modern tolerance for the scatological. To what extent, if any, did this aspect of Rabelais’s style transgress? To parse an example just given, Dindenault’s interjected “mais qu’il ne vous desplaise,” when referencing medicinal properties of sheep droppings seems to acknowledge potential for giving offense. This current reading has admittedly skirted the notions of scandal and obscenity, in part because these are traditionally associated with erotica verba rather than the (merely) scatological.72 Further, the very same episode provides yet another sheep-related lead: “De leur urine les Quintessentiaux tirent le meilleur Salpetre du monde.”73 And again the Thelemic ‘art’ of restoring the whiteness of a pearl yellowed with age by letting it pass through a rooster’s digestive tract (G 56). A comprehensive study of the pre-modern industrial uses of human and animal waste has yet, to my knowledge, to be undertaken. Dindenault’s phrase is all the more charged in that it suggests the use of urine in the production of potassium nitrate for both domestic use (e.g. fertilizer, gunpowder) but also, its alchemical virtues.74 Few authors are as polyvalent as Rabelais, even in an era as fascinated by shapeshifting as the 16th century. Fecal matter is slippery stuff, and its inescapable pungency does not stink the same in the nostrils of all critics who “echarbottent” (“spread around”) the Rabelaisian shit in search of hermeneutic cherry pits. 71 72 73 74

G 40, 110; cw, 93: “that they eat the shit of the world, that is to say the sins, and as shiteaters.” On this topic, see Miernowski, “The Prologue of Gargantua,” but especially Hugh Roberts, Guillaume Peureux, and Lise Wajeman (eds.), Obscénités renaissantes (Geneva: 2011). ql 7, 552; cw, 451: “From their urine the Quintessentials derive the best saltpeter in the world.” For a modern reconsideration of alchemy in general, see Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: 2013). On diverse readings of Rabelais and alchemy, see JeanFrançois Maillard, “Echos ésotériques dans le Cinquiesme livre?” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, 215–226, and, in the same collection, Lionello Sozzi, “Présence de l’ Hermétisme dans le Cinquiesme Livre,” 199–214.

chapter 21

Rabelais (Not) Translated (16th–21st Centuries) Elsa Kammerer

Rabelais’s giants did not wait long to stride over national borders, no matter what aspect of the work of the so-called “French Lucian” delighted its readers: its lively narrative, its farce, its obscenity, the flavor of its “substantific marrow,” its linguistic virtuosity, or the bite of its political and religious satire. The novels of the pentalogy, as well as the Pantagrueline prognostication, were quickly imitated and borrowed from France and abroad, or became the models for, or sources of, a variety of satirical, amusing, farcical or burlesque texts in prose and verse.1 These early waves of often vibrant responses were prompted not only by the dissemination of Rabelais’s writings in French, but also by that of all the texts that were soon attributed to him, as well as by legends associated 1 For an overview of the reception of Rabelais in Europe: Guy Demerson and Myriam Marrache-Gouraud (eds.), François Rabelais (Bibliographie des écrivains français) 32 (RomeParis: 2010); Jacques Boulenger, Rabelais à travers les âges (Paris: 1925); Lazare Sainéan, L’ influence et la réputation de Rabelais: interprètes, lecteurs et imitateurs. Un Rabelaisien, Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde (Paris: 1930), Guy Demerson, François Rabelais (Paris: 1991), 149– 177. For Rabelais in Italy: Marcel Tetel, Rabelais et l’ Italie (Firenze: 1969); in England: Huntington Brown, Rabelais in English Literature (Cambridge, MA: 1933; repr. New York: 1967), Marcel De Grève, “La légende de Gargantua en Angleterre au xvie siècle,” in La réception de Rabelais en Europe du xvie au xviiie siècle, ed. C. De Grève and J. Céard (Paris: 2009), 109–275; De Grève, L’ interprétation de Rabelais au xvie siècle, (er) 3 (Geneva: 1961): 218–243; De Grève, “Limites de l’ influence linguistique de Rabelais en Angleterre au 16e siècle,” in Comparative Literature Studies i.1 (1964): 15–30; Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven: 1998); in the Netherlands: De Grève, “Rabelais au pays de Brueghel. Réflexions sur la popularité de Rabelais dans les Pays-Bas du xvie siècle,” bhr 17 (1955): 154–187; De Grève, L’ interprétation de Rabelais au xvie siècle, 185–203; Paul J. Smith, “Rabelais aux Pays-Bas: l’ édition Elzevier (1663) et la présence de Rabelais dans les bibliothèques privées des Hollandais,” in Editer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges, ed. P.J. Smith (Amsterdam-Atlanta: 1997). There are no studies on Rabelais’s reception in Germany comparable to those by Tetel for Italy and Brown for England: see Walter Schübler, Die Rabelais-Rezeption im deutschen Sprachraum unter besonderer Berücksichtigung übersetzungswissenschaftlicher Aspekte (Vienna: 1992) and my own forthcoming publications. For Spain: J.E. Gillet, “Note sur Rabelais en Espagne,” Revue de littérature comparée 16 (1936): 140– 144; Antonio Domínguez, “Rabelais y España,” Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica 6.1–2 (1980): 83–102; Susana G. Artal, “Rabelais en España. Notas para la crónica de un desencuentro,” Signos (Valparaiso) 28.37 (1995): 11–17. For Switzerland: De Grève L’interprétation de Rabelais au xvie siècle, 208–217.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004460232_023

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

541

with an imagined Rabelais who soon became at least as important as the historic figure himself. The translation by Johann Fischart in Strasbourg (three successive augmented editions of Gargantua in 1575–1590) appeared before Rabelais’s texts in French had achieved significant renown in the Holy Roman Empire; in German historiography, the Geschichtklitterung held up a distorting prism to Rabelais’s work that persisted until Gottlob Regis’s great translation of the complete pentalogy appeared in the first half of the 19thh century. In England, Thomas Urquhart’s translation in 1653 (Gargantua and Pantagruel) gave Rabelais a readership that had until then been restricted to erudite circles; Pierre Le Motteux’s translations in 1693–1694 (Tiers livre, Quart livre and Cinquiesme livre), with their extensive historical and allegorical commentary, confirmed Rabelais’s work as a ‘classic’ in English and launched it as a full-blown subject for study. In the Netherlands, where numerous editions of Rabelais (in French) circulated in the 16th and 17th centuries, Nicolaas Jarichides Wieringa’s translation (1682) confirmed the existence of an early and enduring tradition of reading Rabelais in that country. These translations long remained the only ones in Europe, where Rabelais remained otherwise untranslated: not until the late 18th century did the first Russian translation appear, in response to the continuous interest in French literature displayed by Francophone and Francophile members of Russian high society. In Italy, where Rabelais’s success was quickly and enduringly established (as far back as the 16th century), the first translation only appeared in the late 19th century, at the same time as the first critical work on Rabelais. In the Iberian Peninsula, the first translations in Spanish and Catalan appeared in the early 20th century, motivated in part by the turbulent political context at the time. Different religious interpretations of the Rabelaisian geste in Catholic and Protestant countries doubtless played a decisive role in the publication of translations: it was clearly no coincidence that the first four translators of Rabelais belonged to one Reformation movement or another. Consequently, as was the case in France at the end of the 16th century, Rabelaisian satire, which was very quickly placed on the Index because of its fierce attacks on the abuses of the Catholic church, could easily be turned to serve the Protestant cause, as could Rabelais’s explicit interest in non-mediated readings of the Gospels; conversely, such controversial content legitimately curbed any nascent desire to translate it in areas that remained in the bosom of the Catholic Church. But alongside the political and religious dimension of Rabelais’s texts that may have provided the impulse for these translations, we must not underestimate the role played by their specifically literary qualities. The motivations behind Fischart’s translation, in particular, are in my view less rooted in ideol-

542

kammerer

ogy than in a passion for language—Rabelais’s and his own, to which Fischart attempted, in 1575–1590, to give a decisive thrust as part of the great renascent movement to assert the ‘illustriousness’ of vernacular languages. Urquhart, like Fischart, was fascinated by the infinite possibilities of languages; the decision he made to translate Rabelais also served as a cultural foil for Cromwell’s New Republic by demonstrating that, even without the patronage of a king, the English language was able to preserve its prestige. Wieringa’s work, which drew from Fischart’s and Urquhart’s translations, confirmed the gradual establishment of a European ‘classic.’ In the light of these translations, Rabelais can be seen as an exemplary case: they form a chain that confirms, like his political and religious influence, that he belongs to a European canon of great literary works. The translations actively support, and indeed precede, the canonization enacted by the major annotated editions produced by Elzevier in 1663 and Le Duchat in 1711–1741, which, on the threshold of the 18th century, at last enthroned Rabelais in the pantheon of classic European authors.

1

Prognostications

It was probably no coincidence that the first German, English, and Dutch translations of Rabelais’s novels were preceded by those of the Pantagrueline prognostication. As much as the idea that it was a ‘trial run’ for the translators, or that they feared translating novels perceived as too obscene or dangerous, the anteriority of the Prognostication can be explained by the widespread and enduring success of the already well-established genre of “joyful prognostication,” which combined the parody of the charlatanesque character of the astrologer, inherited from the pre-printing era, with the new text structure of the printed almanac. No doubt redolent with the aura of its eponymous character, Pantagruel, and using all the resources of a genre that was part of a tradition widespread throughout Europe, Rabelais’s Pantagrueline prognostication played the role of a detonator and, soon afterwards, that of a model. In 1554, the printer Jan Cauwell published a Pantagruelsche prognosticatie metter prophetie (“Pantagrueline Prognostication With Prophecy”) in Ghent. The book actually consisted of two translations that have remained anonymous: that of the Pantagrueline prognostication and that of the enigma at the end of Gargantua.2 In 1560, the Antwerp printer Jan ii van Ghelen stated 2 Jelle Koopmans, “Rabelais et la tradition des pronostications,” in Éditer et traduire Rabelais, 35–65.

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

543

that he had printed a Pantagruelsche prophetie annex ende met de Pantagruelsche pronosticatie.3 Plantin’s Index published in 1570 mentions, in the “Flemish books” section, a Prognosticatie van Pantagruel printed in 1554. No copies of this text (or these texts) survive, so we cannot exclude the possibility that there might be two distinct translations—a sign of the success of Rabelais’s Prognostication.4 In 1561 a new Dutch translation of the Prognostication was published in Antwerp in the form of a fairly free adaptation: the Nieuwe Pronosticatie […] decalculeert by Lieripe,5 the name Lieripe evoking the Lyripipii [lyripipes: academic hoods] Sorbonici moralisationes per M. Lupoldum in the Saint-Victor Library. Lieripe takes inspiration from Rabelais or copies him word for word at several points, even if the author does not mention his name. A decade later, in 1572, Johann Fischart (1546/47–1590) published the first German translation of the Pantagrueline prognostication in Basel under the title Aller Practik Großmutter (“The Grandmother of All Prophetic Almanacs”). Again, this was an adaptation more than a translation: Fischart altered the order of the chapters, moved entire passages from one chapter to another, and inserted his own passages. His Practik is above all characterized by a fondness for lists and enumerations, which he uses even more than Rabelais for the physical sound of the words. Republished in 1573 and again in 1574, Fischart’s Practik tripled in volume, especially due to new borrowings from Rabelais and an even more extensive compilation of other German joyful prognostications. In doing so it reinforced the satire that Rabelais had levelled against astrologers: Fischart’s lastrolugius explicitly combines the noun laster (vice) and the verb lügen (to tell lies). In England in 1592—over sixty years before the translation of Rabelais’s romans—the printer John Wolfe added to the Stationer’s Register a prognostication6 that was also directly inspired by the Pantagrueline prognostication. In 1650 another Pantagruel’s Prognostication appeared, also based on Rabelais’s text.7 3 Herman Van Kampen, Herman Pleij, et al. (eds.), Het zal koud zijn in ‘t water als ‘t vriest. Zestiende-eeuwe parodieën op gedrukte jaarvoorspellingen (The Hague: 1980), 162–163 and 208. 4 Dirk Geirnaert, “Imitating Rabelais in Sixteenth-Century Flanders: The Case of Eduard de Dene,” in Editer et traduire Rabelais, 66–100. 5 Nieuwe Pronosticatie […] decalculeert by Lieripe (Antwerp: 1561); modern edition in Het zal koud zijn in ‘t water als ‘t vriest, 162–187. 6 A Wonderfull, Strange and Miraculous, Astrological Prognostication for this Yer of our Lord God … By Adam Fouleweather, student in assetronomy. Cf. Brown, Rabelais in English Literature, 36–41. 7 F.P. Wilson (ed.), Pantagruel’s prognostication certain true ans infallible for the year everlast-

544

kammerer

These early ‘translations’ exemplify a very common practice in Europe at the time, namely “translation-imitation-adaptation” as seen, for instance, in Brant’s Narrenschiff, which was widely translated, imitated, adapted and augmented. The authors of Prognostications, who often remained anonymous, came in the wake of a text that gave the already well-established genre of the “joyful prognostication” its finest exemplar. They produced very ‘free-flowing’ translations, inserting passages from Rabelais into their own text with no desire for accuracy or exhaustiveness. Fischart clearly stands apart in this corpus, however, thanks to a technique I have called entrelardement (interlarding), which is fundamental to his translation of Gargantua.

2

Early Attempts at Translation in the Netherlands: De Dene (Bruges, 1560–1561)

In the Netherlands, where proficiency in French was not the preserve of scholars and where a large proportion of the Flemish population was bilingual, Rabelais’s texts were rapidly disseminated even before they were translated. Rabelais, while appreciated for his farce, was taken very seriously by the Calvinists and members of other movements arising from the Reformation. His novels especially inspired a corpus of satirical works which played an important role in religious disputes at the time. In the 1560s, Rabelais could nonetheless be read, imitated and translated for literary and aesthetic reasons, without being considered primarily (or even exclusively) a model for political and religious satire.8 It is precisely at this time, in Bruges, when Rabelais’s texts must have been well known to a small group of “rhetorickers,” that we find the first attempts to translate Pantagruel.9 Eduard de Dene (ca. 1506–1578), a Bruges rederijker, a prolific writer and an innovative publisher, introduced the Rabelaisian roman into Dutch literature via the catalogue of the Saint-Victor Library. In 1560–1561, De Dene wrote a set of manuscripts collectively entitled Testament rhetoricael in which borrowings not only from Dutch translations of the Pantagrueline prognostication, but also from the edition of Pantagruel dating from 1537–

ing … set forth long since by that famous well wisher to the Mathematicks and Doctor in Physik, Francis Rabelais (Oxford: 1947). Koopmans, “Rabelais et la tradition des prognostications,” 58. 8 Geirnaert, “Imitating Rabelais.” 9 Alfons Dewitte, “Eduard de Dene, de Brugse Rabelais?,” Haec Olim 21 (1971): 53–77; Geirnaert, “Imitating Rabelais.”

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

545

1538,10 have been identified. In the ballad “Mijn langhen Adieu” (“My Long Farewell”), written in April 1560, De Dene bids farewell to all the disciples of Epicure studying at the “bibebrarie”—literally the library (librarie) of drinking (bibere, “Hic bibitur!”). This “bibebrarie” belongs to “master Megaston Rondibellis” (in whom we recognize Maistre Rondibillis from the Tiers livre). De Dene records the titles of 71 volumes:11 most are lifted from the Saint-Victor Library, while another six are directly inspired by chapters 6 and 9 of Pantagruel. What interests De Dene (like the translator of Lieripe) is apparently less the satirical charge of Rabelais’s texts than their verbal inventiveness, which he translates in fragments, and from which he obviously draws inspiration for his own writing, following the principle of free-flowing translation already observed in the case of the Prognostications. But the political and religious turmoil that beset the country from the second half of the 16th century onwards lent increasing weight to the satirical aspects of Rabelais’s work: Rabelais’s comedy, first used for political and religious purposes, found itself rapidly reduced to its satirical dimension alone. The Bienkorf der H. Roomsche Kercke (1569) and the Tableau des différens de la religion (posthumous, 1605) by the Calvinist Philippe Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, both directly inspired by Rabelais, and the twofold Catholic response in the form of Antirabotenus (anon.) and Christelijcken Biencorf der H. Roomscher Kercke by the Jesuit Johannes David, testify to this satirical reception of Rabelais. This probably provides us with one of the main reasons (more than the fact that his work was rapidly placed on the Index) why the first ‘programmatic’ translation of his work came so late (1682), despite promising beginnings.

3

Experiments with Literary German: Fischart’s Early Gargantua (Geschichtklitterung, Strasbourg, 1575–1590)

It was thus in German that the first ‘programmatic’ translation of a Rabelais novel—in other words a translation that is presented as such and that transposes one or more entire books—was made. Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung appeared very early, doubtless even preceding, or at least coinciding with, the dissemination of Rabelais in French across the Empire. Unlike in England, where Montaigne was translated in 1603, just eight years after the 10

11

Geirnaert, “Eduard de Dene and his gift for Hanno,” in Satirical Catalogues—Fictitious Libraries (16th–18th centuries), eds. A.-P. Pouey-Mounou and P.J. Smith (Leiden: forthcoming). Geirnaert, “Imitating Rabelais,” Appendix ii, 99–100.

546

kammerer

complete French edition, and Rabelais in 1653, a hundred years after his death, in Germany the translation of Gargantua appeared just ten years after the Cinquiesme livre, whereas the first translation of Montaigne did not appear until 1753–1754.12 In areas where levels of proficiency in French could not be compared with those in the northern Netherlands, the Geschichtklitterung literally introduced Rabelais to the German-speaking public, and for two and a half centuries he would wear a distorting mask. In the wake of the success of Aller Practik Grossmutter, Fischart presented his 1575 translation of Gargantua as the “calculation,” for Germany, of an almanac made for France: the “history” (Geschichtschrift) of the deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel was “calculated, in a terribly comical way, on the German meridian.” Seven years later, in 1582, he published a second, extensively augmented version, which he called a Geschichtklitterung. This “hotchpotch-history” was followed by a slightly augmented third edition in 1590.13 The translation of Gargantua was to be followed by that of Pantagruel. This was, in any case, the plan Fischart announced at the end of the 1582 edition. To whet the appetites of the reader and buyer-to-be, he listed the episodes of the second book. Fischart only carried out part of this initial plan: in 1590, he published a separate adaptation of the catalogue of the Saint-Victor Library in the form of a Catalogus Catalogorum perpetuo durabilis which comprised, in addition to Rabelais’s 144 titles, 383 of his own.14 Fischart also doubled or tripled the 12 13

14

By Johann Daniel Tietz. Affenteurliche und Ungeheurliche Geschichtschrift … (Strasbourg: 1575; online in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek); Affentheurlich Naupengeheurliche Geschichtklitterung …, (Strasbourg: 1582; online in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; Strasbourg: 1590; online in the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt). There is currently no critical edition of the Geschichtklitterung. The 1590 text is available online. The authoritative edition is Fischarts Geschichtklitterung (Gargantua), ed. A. Alsleben, Synoptischer Abdruck der Bearbeitungen von 1575, 1582 und 1590 (Halle: 1891), later edited by Hildegard Schnabel, Geschichtklitterung (Gargantua): Synoptischer Abdruck der Bearbeitungen von 1575, 1582 und 1590. Mit 3 Titelblättern und den Originalholzschnitten der Ausgabe von 1590 von Tobias Stimmer, 2 vols (Halle: 1969). Most recently, see Tobias Bulang (ed.), Johann Fischart genannt Mentzer. Frühneuzeitliche Autorschaft im intermedialen Kontext, Wolfenbüttel, HerzogAugust-Bibliothek, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen), 2019. On Fischart translating Gargantua, see mainly Lazare Sainéan “Les interprètes de Rabelais en Angleterre et en Allemagne,” Revue des études rabelaisiennes 7.2 (1909): 137–258; Paul Besson, Etude sur Jean Fischart (Paris: 1889), 21–122; Florence Weinberg, Gargantua in a Convex Mirror: Fischart’s View of Rabelais (New York-Bern-Frankfurt: 1986); Beate Kellner, “Fischarts Geschichtklitterung und Rabelais’s Gargantua: Komparatistische Perspektiven,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 59 (2009): 149–167. Johann Fischart, Catalogus catalogorum perpetuo durabilis (Strasbourg: 1590), ed. M. Schilling (Tübingen: 1993). See Jan-Dirk Müller, “Universalbibliothek und Gedächtnis: Apor-

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

547

length of Rabelais’s titles, to give them contemporary relevance, to ironically stigmatize lengthy titles that were common at the time, or to modify the original register of the text. The Catalogus is also akin to a parody of contemporary catalogues of fairs (that of Frankfurt in particular), criticizing the way book production largely depends on the mechanisms of the market. At the same time, he abundantly parodies Conrad Gesner’s Bibliotheca Universalis, both deriding Gesner’s aim of cataloguing universal knowledge and mocking the excessive production of books that all contributed to the craziness of the world. Fischart thus encouraged humility, whilst highlighting the specific power of literature as a source of knowledge where science falls short of the mark.15 In any case, his work confirms the birth of a genre with a bright international future, embodied by imaginary libraries and, more broadly, satirical catalogues.16 The nine new editions of the Geschichtklitterung that appeared until 1631 testify to its not inconsiderable success, which was not, indeed, limited to Alsace. But in 1624, Martin Opitz’s Deutsche Poeterey left Fischart’s verbal exuberance little chance of continued success, just as in France Malherbe had, twenty years earlier, initiated the purification of the French language. The Thirty Years’ War, which had dramatic consequences for book production, especially in Strasbourg, finally, albeit temporarily, consigned Fischart’s translation to oblivion. His lexical and stylistic power nevertheless continued, even in Strasbourg, to inspire the satirists of the Tannengesellschaft. In late humanist stylistic debates, Caspar Barth, a fierce opponent of the Ciceronianists referred to in the 20th century as the “neo-Latin Fischart,” still had Rabelais and Fischart on the horizon of his thought when he stigmatized contemporary tendencies towards classicism: in 1623 he published an enthusiastic encomium of their works.17 In the absence of studies on the dissemination of Rabelais in 17th- and 18th-century Germany, we cannot exclude the hypothesis that he was actively received. How-

15 16

17

ien frühneuzeitlicher Wissenskodifikation bei Conrad Gesner (Mit einem Ausblick auf Antonio Possevino, Theodor Zwinger und Johann Fischart),” in Erkennen und Erinnern in Kunst und Literatur, eds. D. Peil et al. (Tübingen: 1998), 285–309; Erich Kleinschmidt, “Die konstruierte Bibliothek: Zu Johann Fischarts ‘Catalogus catalogorum’ (1590),” Etudes germaniques 50 (1995): 541–555; Tobias Bulang, “Possible Discourses and the Unfolding of the Implicit. Some Remarks on Fischart’s Catalogus Catalogorum”, in Anne-Pascale PoueyMounou, Paul J. Smith (eds.), Early Modern Catalogues of Imaginary Books. A Scholarly Anthology (Leiden, Boston: Brill 2019), 160–189. Schilling’s edition. Dietmar Rieger, Imaginäre Bibliotheken: Bücherwelten in der Literatur (Munich: 2002); Dirk Werle, Copia librorum. Problemgeschichte imaginierter Bibliotheken 1580–1630 (Tübingen: 2007); Pouey-Mounou and Smith, Satirical Catalogues. Caspar Barth, “Lyricorum Libri ii,” in Fabularum Aesopiarum Libri v (Franfurt: 1623; repr. 1982), 210 and 259–260.

548

kammerer

ever, the first known reactions to Rabelais’s work date from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, suggesting that before then Rabelais was buried and forgotten: Fischart’s prose, assailed by Opitz and the Thirty Years’ War, seems to have taken Rabelais to the grave with it. But the fact remains that before it was consigned to oblivion, the Geschichtklitterung was the translation of Rabelais that achieved the most success when it was published. Fischart’s approach is a highly original feature in the landscape of translations of Rabelais. We see it as being based on a two-pronged technique comprising entrelardement (“interlarding”): Fischart extensively augmented Rabelais’s text in 1575, adding three chapters, expanding the existing lists and adding new ones, inserting examples, learned allusions, and references to contemporary figures and events, and including numerous etymological plays on words. As he did this, Fischart juggled masterfully with various states of the German language, with different dialects, and with Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish—all of which the new-born Gargantua was able to speak without difficulty: Soudain qu’il fut né, ne cria comme les autres enfans “Mies, mies mies,” mais à haute voix s’escrioit “A boire! à boire! à boire!,” comme invitant tout le monde à boire, si bien qu’il fut ouy de tout le païs de Beusse, et de Bibarois. G vi

So bald es nun erohret war, schrey es nicht wie andere Kinder Mie, Mie, Mie, noch auff Herodotisch und Beccesalenisch Beck, Becke, Becken: (wiewol das gebäch und die Wecken zu seim folgenden durstigen geschrey sich wol schicken) auch lachts nicht auff Zoroastrisch, dann es sparts nach der Physicorum lehr biß über 40 tag: Sonder Sonder ruffet mit heller stimm zusauffen her, zusauffen, tosupen, und bald hernach im andern thon, Tranck, trenck, trinck, tronck, trunck, und zum letzten Aha Baire, Bere, Bibere, Boire, Bure, als ober er die gantz Welt zusauffen ermant, das gantze Supplingerland, Weinstram, und Tranckreich. Geschichtklitterung 9

This process of amplification, first achieved by playing with the sounds of the vowels a-e-i-o-u inserted into the verb trinken, to drink (Tranck, trenck, trinck, tronck, trunck), continues with the repetition of the verb in several languages: baire in old French, bere in Italian, bibere in Latin, boire in French, and finally bure or buire meaning “jug.” The thirsty baby’s tirade ends with etymological puns which, like Beusse et Bibarois, derived from boire, associate the Supplinger-

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

549

land (“land of soup”) with the Weinstram (“stream of wine”) and with France (Frankreich), perceived as the Trankreich, the “empire of drink” par excellence. The Geschichtklitterung thus provides a strange counterpoint to the theory and practice of translation in the Renaissance. While he entirely, and most often convincingly, renders Rabelais’s text, Fischart aims to distance himself from it as much as he can. At the end of the prologue, he states that he undertook to translate Rabelais into German after seeing the failed attempts of other translators whose texts lacked inspiration and thus turned out to be “boring and graceless, in the same way as one might set forth a treatise by Donat” and, worse still, “incomprehensible and contrary to what the author said,” and even “difficult to read and un-German” (a play on words: undeitlich und unteutschlich). So Fischart undertook to translate Rabelais himself: As people wished to have the text in German, I wanted to dress it up [verkleiden, which also means ‘to disguise’] in German rather than having to put up with an unskilled tailor. But I did not submit to the words, nor to the order of the text; I merely had to follow the meaning [Verstand]. And when the latter escaped from the meadow, I castrated it and easily translated it [vertiert], in other words, I made it turn back.18 The castration metaphor caused much ink to flow in the 20th century. In my view, it should be considered from a purely biological point of view: it concerns the castration of the bull, an image that follows on from that of the meadow. One of the consequences of bovine castration is that the bull gets fatter, and indeed does Fischart not fatten Rabelais’s text with his entrelardements, making it treble in volume in the 1590 version? In his translation of the expression beaulx livres de haulte gresse in the Prologue, Fischart first translates gresse by dicker fette and mercklichem marckhafftem Schmär (Schmalz), giving the expression his own dual meaning, that of “thick fat” and “remarkable marrowfat.” Only in 1582 did he also give the expression a possible figurative meaning: “… diser holdseligen Büchlein von innerlicher dicker fette, und mercklichem marckhafftem Schmär viler lehren gespicktet.”19 The initial act of translation

18

19

Schnabel (ed.), Geschichtklitterung, 19–20: “Derwegen da man ihn je wolt Teutsch haben, hab ich ihn eben so mehr inn Teutsch wellen verkleiden, alß daß ich einen ungeschickteren Schneider müst druber leiden: Doch bin ich an die Wort und Ordnung ungebunden gewesen: unnd mich benügt, wann ich den verstand erfolget: auch hab ich ihn etwan, wann er auß der Küheweyd gangen, castriert, und billich vertiert, das ist, umbgewand.” Schnabel (ed.), Geschichtklitterung, 29 (additions made to the 1575 edition in 1582 in italics).

550

kammerer

seems, quite deliberately, to have been that of a “fattening” process whose aim was not primarily to add depth to the original text; the “marrow” is that of the fat, of the lard (marckhafftem Schmär); it is, so to speak, layered onto the text, covering it from the outside. Only at the second stage, in 1582, does Fischart seem to return to a figurative sense of Rabelais’s “haulte gresse,” specifying that it is “inner” (innerlich) and dotted with “many lessons” (viler lehren). Rabelais’s texts, which still had contemporary appeal in France when Fischart visited Paris around 1567, in the middle of the civil war, may have appeared—as they did to many French Huguenots at the time—ripe for the Protestant cause. From this standpoint, we cannot exclude the idea that Fischart may have been hoping to achieve an editorial tour de force: Bernhard Jobin, one of the great Strasbourg printers and Fischart’s brother-in-law, for whom Fischart worked exclusively, perhaps as a proofreader or editorial advisor, and in any case as an ‘in-house author’ for over ten years, devoted much of his production to anti-Catholic pamphlets and fliers written by Fischart, at a time when the Council of Trent and the dissemination of Calvinism were putting Lutheranism on the defensive in Strasbourg. But the originality of the Geschichtklitterung lies more, it seems, in its verbal virtuosity than in its satirical charge: the contribution of Fischart, who made Rabelais’s comedy into the setting for a language that was, like the Romance languages, seeking to become “illustrious,” was not so much ideological as philological and esthetic. His additions throughout the text undoubtedly constitute, to some degree, a parody of humanist encyclopedism; but they also show Fischart experimenting with language and its potentialities. As he translated Rabelais, Fischart used the liberties the former took with his own language to experiment in turn with the countless possibilities of German. In doing so, he attempted to establish a truly literary idiom capable of rivalling the so-called ‘legitimate’ romance languages on the European literary scene. From this point of view, the Geschichtklitterung might be seen perhaps not as a Defense and Illustration of German, but at the very least as its Illustration.

4

The Making of an English Classic: Urquhart’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653)

In England, Rabelais initially remained untranslated, whereas Montaigne’s Essais were translated by John Florio in 1603, Robert Garnier’s tragedies were rendered in English just ten or twenty years after they were published in France, and Robert Estienne’s Apologie pour Hérodote (1566) was translated in 1599. A translation of Rabelais perhaps seemed unnecessary insofar as English speak-

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

551

ers thought they already had one, a printed English version of one of the Chroniques of Gargantua having appeared in the second half of the 16th century. In any case, the dissemination of Rabelais and his linguistic influence in England were, compared to Italy, relatively insignificant and characterized by ambivalence or indeed confusion. For almost a century, Rabelais was read and admired solely within the confines of elite social and intellectual circles, among the sophisticated, especially those in the university, court and legal world, where Rabelais is regarded as a wellhead of wit and prized for his impatience with moralistic solemnity.20 His success among “libertines” and “literary bohemians” may also have sparked mistrust in more righteous circles.21 Generally, Rabelais was perceived in England more as “the merry jester of France” (according to an expression attributed to Francis Bacon) than as the heretic, Calvinist, or “atheist” perceived as a threat in France. Highlighting the conditions under which Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromartie (1611–1660), a Scottish mathematician, courtier, dilettante, philologist, poet, and soldier, made the first English translations of Gargantua and Pantagruel22 in the months leading up to Cromwell’s proclamation of the Republic, points to their specifically political dimension. Urquhart took part in the Battle of Worcester in 1651 on the Royalist side and was taken prisoner following the Parliamentarian victory. While in prison, encouraged by John Hall, he translated the first two books of Rabelais. Since the early 1640s, Hall had been seeking to win a cultural battle for the Republicans; following the regicide he urged Parliament to develop a system of literary patronage that might erode the identification made by Royalists between cultural prestige and the monarchy. Hall’s support for Urquhart’s undertaking may thus be a response to the accusation often made by the Cavaliers that wit had fled England following the demise of 20 21 22

Lake Prescott, Imagining Rabelais, 60 and 75. Alfred Horatio Upham, The French Influence in English Literature from the Accession of Elizabeth to the Restoration (New York: 1908); De Grève, L’interprétation de Rabelais, 237. The First [second] Book of the Works of Mr. François Rabelais … (London: 1653). On Urquhart’s translation, C. Whibley “Rabelais en Angleterre,” Revue des études rabelaisiennes 1.1 (1903): 1–12; Sainéan, “Les interprètes de Rabelais,” 139–206; Frederick C. Roe, Sir Thomas Urquhart and Rabelais (Oxford: 1957); Roger J. Craik, Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, 1611–1660, Adventurer, Polymath, and Translator of Rabelais (Lewiston: 1993) and his “The Triumph of Exuberance over Inhibition: Sir Thomas Urquhart’s Translation of Rabelais,” Lamar Journal of the Humanities 22.1 (1996): 41–64; Bernhard Jansen, The English Rabelais: Untersuchungen zu Sir Thomas Urquharts Übersetzung des Gargantua aus dem Jahr 1653 (Aachen: 1989); Shaun Regan, “Translating Rabelais: Sterne, Motteux, and the Culture of Politeness,” Translation and Literature 10.2 (2001): 174–199. Contrary to what Sainéan (and later Demerson) says, Urquhart was not a doctor. The label learned Physitian comes from Le Motteux, in his preface to the 1693 edition of the Tiers livre.

552

kammerer

the king, to be replaced by a tyranny embodied by high-minded Puritan literature.23 It was thus the literary dimension of Rabelais that provided the focus and justification for its translation into English. One might say that this ‘exhibition’ of the literary potential of English is all the easier to understand because Urquhart translated at a time when English was doubtless more dynamic and flexible than it had ever been: Elizabethan English, still effervescent at the time, could be adapted to a whole range of registers;24 it was, indeed, in 1651–1660 that the highest number of foreign words found their way into English. Urquhart, whose travels in Europe allowed him to learn several languages (so much so, he said, that he could pass for a native speaker), showed an early passion for languages and even invented a universal language. Clearly fascinated by Rabelais’s lexical inventions, Urquhart created new coinages such as “the Rammishnesse of the Spaniards supergivuregondigaded by Friar Inigo.” His translation has consequently been compared to the work of a “tailor” adding his own “stitches” to the original fabric.25 Like Fischart, Urquhart also chose to use archaic-sounding language (“thou” and “thee” instead of “you,” verb endings in “–eth,” reversed word order, and spellings such as “foole,” “poore,” “boxe,” and “antick”). Unlike Fischart, who did not have a French-German dictionary at his disposal, Urquhart was able to use the Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611) by Randle Cotgrave, one of the earliest modern lexicographers and, in a sense, the first English translator of Rabelais. Urquhart’s considerable debt to Cotgrave,26 in addition to his probable use of Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung,27 partly explains why his translation is longer than the original: instead of choosing a single translation from Cotgrave, Urquhart selected several terms offered by the lexicographer for the same entry. Neither did he hesitate to add fourteen well-honed insults to the twenty-eight hurled by the fouaciers of

23 24

25 26

27

Nicholas McDowell, “Urquhart’s Rabelais: Translation, Patronage, and Cultural Politics,” English Literary Renaissance 35 (2005): 273–303. Roe, Sir Thomas Urquhart and Rabelais, 18: “… this late-born Elizabethan contrives to convey the full-blooded impression of Renaissance virility, the rollicking gaiety, the joy in loquacity, and he serves up, à l’ écossaise, as appetizing a dish as that concocted in Touraine.” Paul Coleman, “ ‘The Taylor’s Stitch’: Sir Thomas Urquhart’s Translation of Rabelais,” The Cambridge Quarterly 32.4 (2003): 299–309. On Urquhart using Cotgrave, see Sainéan, “Les interprètes de Rabelais,” 139–206; Craik, “The Pioneer Translators of Rabelais: Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Motteux,” Translation Review 51–52 (1996): 31–42. Enny E. Kraaijveld, “Les premiers traducteurs de Gargantua: Urquhart lecteur de Fischart,” er 25 (1991): 125–130.

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

553

Lerné at the shepherds of Grandgousier (including “slabberdegullion druggels,” “blockish grutnols,” and “doddi-pol-jolt-heads”), nor to lengthen the list of Gargantua’s games by 120, adding for instance “loosegig,” “nivinivinack,” “twirlie whirlietrill,” and “swaggie waggie or shoggieshou.” The “dames de hault parage” invited to enter Thélème were not only “fleurs de beauté à céleste visaige/ A droict corsage, à maintien preude et saige”; Urquhart makes them … Ladies of high birth, Delicious, stately, charming, full of mirth, Ingenious, lovely, miniard, proper, faire, Magnetick, graceful, splendid, pleasant, rare, Obliging, sprightly, vertuous, young, solacious, Kinde, neat, quick, feat, bright, compt, ripe, choice, dear, precious, Alluring, courtly, comely, fine, compleat, Wise, personable, ravishing and sweet …28 Unlike Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung, Urquhart’s translation, whose qualities of compromise Le Motteux emphasized,29 only met with limited success if we measure its fortunes by the fact that it was only republished once (in 1664, with a new title and the addition of a life of Rabelais). Its real success (five editions in the 18th century, nine in the 19th) is in reality linked to the addition, forty years later, of the three other books of the pentalogy by Pierre Le Motteux (1660– 1718), a Huguenot from Rouen who had fled to England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and who was also a publisher, a playwright and a translator of other major literary works. In 1693 Le Motteux published the Tiers livre that Urquhart had translated, but which had remained in manuscript form; in 1694 he added his own translations of the Quart livre and the Cinquiesme livre. It was this two-man translation, made over a period of forty years but rapidly republished, that ultimately gave Rabelais classic status in England.30

28 29

30

Urquhart, Gargantua, liv, 239–240. Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds, and Sayings of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The Works of F. Rabelais M.D., or the Lives … of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Urquhart and Le Motteux (London: 1693–1694), vol. i, xxxv: Urquhart’s translation, “neither affecting the politeness of the most nice and refined of our modern English writers, nor yet the roughness of our antiquated authors, but such a medium as might neither shock the ears of the first, nor displease those who would have an exact imitation of the style of Rabelais.” Works, trans. Urquhart and Le Motteux. Cf. Gargantua and Pantagruel, translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux, with an Introduction by Terence Cave (New YorkToronto: 1994).

554 5

kammerer

Wieringa (1682): Rabelais Corrected

It was no accident that the first translation of Rabelais in the Netherlands was the work of a Frisian, in other words a man from a province in the far north where French remained a foreign language. The first Dutch translation of the “witty works” (Geestige Werken) of Rabelais (the pentalogy, the Pantagrueline pronostication, and the Lettres d’Italie) appeared in 1682 and was written by Nicolaas Jarichides Wieringa, alias Claudio Gallitalo.31 The vice-rector of the Latin school in Harlingen, Wieringa had already attracted attention with a few translations, especially from Italian. His translation of Rabelais appeared shortly after the publication of Elzevier’s edition of 1663, republished in 1666 and plagiarized three times in the space of twelve years, at a time when demand for texts by Rabelais was very strong.32 Unlike the German and English works, the Dutch translation seems to have been prompted by the presence of highquality editions of the original.33 Wieringa apparently used Cotgrave’s dictionary and both Urquhart’s and Fischart’s translations,34 turning to them especially for the translation of technical terms; the term slampampers (“good-for-nothings”) which, in Wieringa’s text, translates the word “pantagruélistes,” may come from Fischart’s schlampampische gute Schlucker (itself a somewhat curious rendering of “pantagruélistes”35). Wieringa also sometimes took a term from Fischart without properly under31

32

33

34 35

Alle de Geestige Werken van Mr. François Rabelais, Genees heer in ses boeken, de dappere daaden van Grandgousier, Gargantua en Pantagruel […] beneffens een sleutel of verklaring van’t geheele Werk. Met groote vlijt uyt het Fransch vertaelt door Claudio Gallitalo (Amsterdam: 1682). http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/Dutch/Renaissance/Rabelais1682.html. See C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute, “N.J. Wieringa, traducteur hollandais de Rabelais,”Humanisme et Renaissance 3.1 (1936): 43–51, and his Nicolaas Jarichides Wieringa: Een zeventiendeeeuwse vertaler van Boccalini, Rabelais, Barclai, Leti e.a. (Assen: 1939). This edition, with a large number of paratextual additions, was eagerly awaited, including in France: not the least paradox for an author who was both very popular and strictly banned in the late 17th century (Smith “Rabelais aux Pays-Bas”). Wieringa’s translation may have been preceded by other partial translations of Rabelais in Dutch. An anonymous auction catalogue from 1680 mentions a Pantagruel (Catalogus […] librorum praecipue autem Judicorum (The Hague: 1680), 23, quoted by Kraaijveld “Les premiers traducteurs de Rabelais: Wieringa lecteur de Fischart et d’Urquhart,” in Editer et traduire Rabelais, 178). It is not known whether this is a Dutch translation that predates that of Wieringa, or Fischart’s translation: studies of several 17th century auction catalogues show that the Geschichtklitterung (“F. Rabelais in hoogduytsch,” “Rabelais germanice”) circulated in the Netherlands throughout the century. Kraaijveld, “Les premiers traducteurs de Rabelais,” 187–193. Elsa Kammerer, Copia ridiculorum. Rabelais sur le métier de Fischart (1575–1590) (forthcoming).

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

555

standing it: the “homme de bien” in Gargantua 27 is translated by Fischart as Bidermann, and by Wieringa as Beedelaar (“beggar”). Moreover, additions made by Wieringa to Rabelais’s text in his translation are often inspired by Fischart’s amplifications. The word “vielleuz” (“vielle player,” Gargantua 17), which Fischart renders as ein blinder Spieler (“a blind player”), is translated by Urquhart, apparently following Fischart’s lead, as a blind fiddler. Wieringa’s een old blindeman only retains the blindness of the vielle player, which Fischart introduced and Urquhart perpetuated.36 But the spirit of Wieringa’s translation is very different from that of Fischart and Urquhart because of the close attention he pays to the Rabelaisian moëlle. In his foreword, he presents the “liberties” taken by Rabelais as the means to an edifying end: Although Rabelais is sometimes a little too free-spirited, too excessive or too vulgar, remember that he is from another century and that he is all the more hypocritical for being sincere: he will then pay you back twofold with words that are all the more serious and edifying.37 In his preface to the translation of Rabelais, the printer Jan den Hoorn explains that Wieringa considerably reworked Rabelais’s language, teaching him to speak “clear, simple Dutch, instead of impure French peppered with Greek and Latin, Italian and Spanish, English, German and other foreign languages with which his work was replete.” The “classicism” movement had already made significant inroads in 17th century Europe, and we can see how Wieringa’s version stood apart from those of Fischart and Urquhart. Wieringa’s Geestige Werken were considered authoritative until 1931, when J.A. Sandfort—who also translated Céline when he was still alive—produced a new translation of the giants’ tale, drawing much inspiration from Wieringa. The end of the 20th century saw the publication of two new concomitant translations by Théo Buckinx (1995) and J.M. Vermeer-Pardoen (1996–1998), while the Pantagrueline prognostication, with which the Dutch translations had begun, has enjoyed continued success with a modern edition of Lieripe in 1980, translations by P.J. Smith and N. van der Toorn in 1994, and another by H. Vermeer-Pardoen in 2003.38

36 37 38

Kraaijveld, “Les premiers traducteurs de Rabelais,” 177. De Grève, “Rabelais au pays de Brueghel,” 206. Demerson and Marrache-Gouraud, François Rabelais, 475, 476, 479.

556 6

kammerer

Pierre Le Motteux (1693–1694): A Translation for the Exiled Huguenots

Equally attentive to the Rabelaisian moëlle, and above all to the use the Huguenot diaspora might make of it, Le Motteux’s translation stands apart from its predecessors in that it offers, for the first time, an extensive commentary that gave a decisive thrust to historical-allegorical Rabelaisian criticism in a century constantly hungry for “keys” to Rabelais.39 Le Duchat, whose philological approach contrasts sharply with that of Le Motteux, nevertheless made abundant use of his notes, although neither Le Duchat nor the translators of the commentary into French forty years later (César de Missy in particular) saw fit to mention his name. In the 1693 preface, Le Motteux, eager to remain stylistically close to Fischart and Urquhart,40 defended the latter’s decision to avoid cutting the original text and to render the text immediately comprehensible to English readers by replacing the words he considered too difficult or by accompanying them with other terms, based in particular on Cotgrave; Urquhart thus kept the obscurity of Rabelais’s text in check. Le Motteux himself, who was keen to adapt Rabelais to current circumstances, included in his own translation elements of Rabelais’s Briefve declaration and the Alphabet françois from the 1663 Elzevier edition, making the Island of the Macréons the island where people have long lives and where the persecuted found a safe haven, i.e. England. Le Motteux’s translation, which was very scrupulous and consequently less inspired than Urquhart’s, sought to help the English reader by explaining difficult terms and explaining references. He also self-avowedly took up the challenge of tackling lexical and syntactic archaisms and implicit references, as well as the linguistic luxuriance and “sublime expressions” of Rabelais. His reading of Rabelais and his ambitions in translating him are thus very different from those of Fischart and Urquhart: it was first and foremost the moëlle that interested him, or more precisely the (polemic) use that could be made of Rabelais’s opus. Consequently, his motivations, unlike Urquhart’s, were essentially religious and linked to the plight of the Huguenots. Rabelais’s text was, in his eyes, a 39

40

De Grève, “Les érudits du xviie siècle en quête de la clef de Rabelais,” er 5 (1964): 41–63. Sainéan observes, however, that “the convoluted exegesis launched by Le Motteux paralyzed Rabelaisian studies for almost two centuries by covering them with an impenetrable fog.” He also feels that the translation takes too many liberties with the original: “… words, phrases, and entire lines are added or inserted. It is a belle infidèle …” (L’influence et la réputation de Rabelais: Interprètes, lecteurs et imitateurs. Un Rabelaisien, Marnix de SainteAldegonde [Paris: 1930], 47 and 76). Sainéan, L’ influence et la réputation de Rabelais, 52.

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

557

satire “which partly exposes the Popish Fopperies”;41 indeed, he deliberately omitted a passage unfavorable to Calvinists and expunged the names of saints. By adopting “accommodating manoeuvres,”42 Le Motteux explicitly distanced himself from the original, in the name of the politeness he said he owed his readers. He thus paradoxically defends Rabelais in the eyes of a Protestant readership that the Catholics regularly criticized for reading a libertine author. The reader, says Le Motteux, drawing a contrast between the civilized bee and the venomous spider, is himself responsible for the chaste or lascivious use he makes of his reading. Insofar as Rabelais has to be read in a satirical/allegorical way, he sees the obscenities as a mere mask concealing the deeper marrow; consequently, they may be attenuated in the translation. Le Motteux’s translation, compared with those of his predecessors, is more broadly directed towards deliberate moral objectives: its interpretation of Rabelais sometimes even verges on a kind of falsification. In the decades following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the translations by Urquhart and Le Motteux had a significant influence on Restoration writers, especially Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) and Laurence Sterne (1713–1768). They became the standard translations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were constantly republished during that time. The translation by W.F. Smith published in 1893, which had a small print run, hardly competed with them, and they continued as the standard texts until 1994, when they were selected by the University of Pennsylvania’s Project Gutenberg Collection of Online Books.43 After the two Anglo-American translations by Samuel Putnam (1929) and Jacques Le Clercq (1936), intended for a broad readership, the pendulum swung back towards more scholarly translations harking back to Le Motteux, namely those of J.M. Cohen (1955) and Burton Raffel (1990), both professional translators. The authoritative translation is currently that of Donald Frame (1991), the first to have been made by a specialist in 16th-century literature, followed by M.A. Screech (2006).44 Like his US predecessors, Frame opts for modernization, especially of the Latin quotes.

41 42 43 44

Gentleman’s Journal (November 1693): 380. Regan, “Translating Rabelais.” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1200/1200‑h/1200‑h.htm. Demerson and Marrache-Gouraud, François Rabelais.

558 7

kammerer

The Failed Update: Sander’s Adaptation (1785–1787)

For an entire century, these German, English and Dutch translations of Rabelais stood alone. In the 18th century, in France, opinion was broadly hostile to Rabelais; but at the same time there was admiration for this learned philosopher whom some saw as a precursor of the Enlightenment.45 The solution was to “purge” Rabelais to make reading him acceptable.46 But at the end of the century, the first Russian translation of Gargantua was published. It marked the beginning of a continuous interest in Rabelais in Russia: after several partial translations between 1899 and 1936,47 N. Ljubimov published the first complete translation of the five Livres in 1961, sparking a keen interest in Rabelais reflected in the number of new translations that have appeared until today. Also at the end of the Enlightenment, we see the publication in Germany of the transposition by Christian Levin Sander (1756–1819) or “Dr. Eckstein,” after several unsuccessful attempts or unkept promises to translate Rabelais had been made at the end of the 18th century. Sander, a child of the Aufklärung, tutor to the family of the Count of Reventlow in Copenhagen, translator of Danish authors and author of unsuccessful plays, novels, and poems, recalled that Rabelais had already suffered, on the “anvil” of Fischart, a “more than Ovidian metamorphosis”; he intended in his turn to set about Rabelais “with spade and pickaxe,” altering his work beyond recognition. In fact, seeking to revive the parodic dimension of the Rabelaisian novels by updating it, Sander adapted the original story to the events, locales, and figures of his own era.48 The Limousin schoolboy thus becomes a student in Hamburg who uses and abuses the excesses of noun composition, adverbization, and adjectivization characteristic of Klopstock, the precursor of Sturm und Drang, whose name

45

46

47 48

Richard Cooper, “ ‘Charmant mais très obscène’: Some French Eighteenth Century Readings of Rabelais,” in Enlightenment: Essays in memory of Robert Shackleton, eds. G. Barber and C.P. Courtney (Oxford: 1988), 39–60. This is what Jean Bernier did with his Véritable Rabelais réformé, and others who published extensively retouched versions such as Rabelais populaire, Rabelais moderne, or Rabelais classique (Cooper, “Le véritable Rabelais déformé,” in Éditer et traduire Rabelais, 195–220). Demerson and Marrache-Gouraud, François Rabelais, 500–510. Christian Levin Sander, Gargantua und Pantagruel, zusammengeschmolzen und umgearbeitet nach Rabelais und Fischart von Doctor Eckstein (Hamburg: 1785–1787). On Sander’s translation, Jean-Paul Barbe, “Christian Lävin Sander adaptateur de Rabelais: Libertés d’ un traducteur à la fin du xviiie siècle,” in Mélanges offerts à Jacques Grange à l’occasion de son départ à la retraite, eds. J.-P. Barbe and G. Volz (Nantes: 1989), 17–26.

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

559

Charlotte utters at a particularly dramatic moment in Goethe’s Werther (1774– 1787). As for Pantagruel, after touring German universities, he is to be found in Vienna, where he has just finished his study of the seven liberal arts. Now eager to feel the “spirit” of the time and having heard that the Leipzig fair had been especially rich that year, he gets hold of the 1790 books that were on offer there and applies himself to reading them all. Sander then inserts in his translation, in place of the catalogue of the Saint-Victor Library, that of the Leipzig Fair of 1785 as published in the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung on 18 April 1785. In Sander’s work Pantagruel embodies (in parodic mode?) a ruthless literary critic who appeals for German authors able to carry on the work of the greats (Wieland, Goethe, Von Hippel), while endeavoring to drag a few pearls from the mud. Rabelais’s criticism of the “Sorbonnicoles” and “Sorbonnards” thus finds itself transposed into the field of literary criticism. With the exception of a certain “Doctor Sauertopf” whose laudatory letter is reproduced at the beginning of volume 3, critics remained silent about this German adaptation. Only Adelung, the famous philologist, grammarian and librarian and the author of the first major scientific dictionary in German, reacted, but he did so to stigmatize the absence of real comedy in Rabelais as in Fischart, who were both too vulgar for his taste. Gottlob Regis, the great early 19th-century translator of the pentalogy, dealt the fatal blow: any attempt to systematically update and parody an author who is himself parodic is not only hard to justify, he says, but also necessarily “ridiculous.”

8

The Challenge of Poetry: Regis (1832–1841)

While Rabelais was firing the imaginations of the French Romantics (Nodier, Chateaubriand, Sand, Flaubert, Balzac, Michelet),49 in Germany Jean Paul (1763–1825) expressed his fascination for the richness, erudition, and inventiveness of Rabelais’s language, seeing Fischart as the agent of its “rebirth” (Wiedergebärer).50 A passage in his Vorschule der Ästhetik provided the initial impulse for the masterful translation by Gottlob Regis (1832–1841). Jean Paul

49 50

Cooper, “Reading and unraveling Rabelais through the ages,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais, ed. J. O’Brien (Cambridge, Eng.: 2011), 141–156 (146–147). Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. N. Miller, vol. 5 (Munich: 1963), 142, n. 1: “An Sprach- und Bilder- und sinnlicher Fülle übertrifft Fischart weit den Rabelais und erreicht ihn an Gelehrsamkeit und aristophanischer Wort-Schöpfung; er ist mehr dessen Wiedergebärer als Übersetzer.”

560

kammerer

suggested a bilingual framework for the translation whose text and commentaries would be based on Le Duchat’s 1741 edition.51 Unlike his German predecessors, Regis, who came from a Saxon family of law teachers and Protestant pastors and was a late contemporary of Goethe and a friend of Ludwig Tieck, Carl Gustav Carus, and Jean Paul, was a professional translator. After studying law in Leipzig (he thus had the same training as Fischart) and making several journeys in Europe, Regis, who was unusually erudite, devoted himself entirely to ancient and modern languages and literatures. In 1825 he moved to Breslau, where he focused exclusively on translation. In 1818, encouraged by two Breslau philologists to whom he submitted his first translation of a short passage, he made up his mind to translate the entire roman from the 1741 Le Duchat edition, which he felt to be authoritative (despite the fact that at the beginning of the 19th century, scientific editions and new editions were legion in France, as well as expurgated editions and versions including apocryphal texts). Following Jean Paul’s intuition, Regis intended his translation to be presented in a bilingual framework; but the planned bilingual edition was finally abandoned in favor of a weighty three-volume monolingual edition, with the translation in the first volume and the commentary in the other two (over 1500 pages of commentary alone).52 Regis finished the first draft of the translation in 1823; he reworked it until 1830, when he submitted it to the publisher Johann Ambrosius Barth, who published it in 1832. The commentary was completed in 1834. Barth’s slowness to publish led to heated arguments in which Prince Johann von Sachsen, then the Academy of Science, intervened. Regis continued to add to his annotations, and the commentary was finally published in 1839 and 1841. It was a tedious chore for Regis, who wanted to be a translator and not a commentator. He mostly compiled already outdated French critical editions and commentaries (especially those of Le Duchat, Delaulnaye, Johanneau, Salverte, and Lacroix), which he translated into German; he also included original analysis later used in part by Brunet, then analyzed by Sainéan; Regis’s contributions are still a source that remains to be explored by Rabelais specialists.53 Regis also prepared a glossary of all the terms used by Rabelais, which he tried in vain to have published in Paris at the end of his life.

51 52 53

Meister Franz Rabelais der Arzeney Doctoren Gargantua und Pantagruel, trans. G. Regis (Leipzig: 1832–1841), t. ii-1, 1425. Meister Franz Rabelais, trans. Regis. Gustave Brunet, Essais d’études bibliographiques sur Rabelais (Paris: 1841), vi; Sainéan, “Les interprètes de Rabelais,” 244–258.

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

561

In a “hypothetical foreword” which remained in manuscript form until it was published in rer in 1905,54 Regis presented his translation as “an attempt to contribute to the understanding of the comic author who, for us Moderns, is undoubtedly, in his way, closest to the Ancients.” This was a singularly difficult task, which required both “balanced humor” and a “true sense of rhythm for our language as it was in Luther’s day.”55 Spurred on by the desire to contribute to the prestige of the German language, Regis recognized in 16th-century French a kinship that connected both languages—French and German—to “ancient Greek of the Ionian period,” and which he endeavored to render in his own language mainly through etymological wordplay. Regretful that “the indigestible age of Louis xiv, with its over-polished mannerisms” had discredited the language of Rabelais, Regis tried to restore it in the eyes of the French themselves, convinced that “healthy literary criticism [would], little by little, ultimately follow Germany’s lead.” The main challenge Regis faced in Rabelais’s text was its poetry. In his eyes, commentaries prompted by Rabelais’s work had no other aim than to enhance the pleasure of reading him; they did not reflect the ultimate meaning of the text, which intrinsically relies on “imagination”; such “prattlers” (geschwätzig) and “guessers” (Rather) as Bernier, Le Motteux, De Marsy, and Esmangart could only supply narrow explanations, as the truly literary work remains impervious to all forms of elucidation. A poet would not be a poet if one managed to decipher all the enigmas contained in his work: In a word: Rabelais is, by nature, purely imaginative; armed with this imagination, he seeks, through lyrical and comical inventions, to free himself from the burden of his time. […] Only a poet (whether narrative or not, as long as his very being is poetic) must be the master of his poem. A non-poet, however cultivated, would be unable to slip immediately into his skin. What is so irresistibly appealing about Rabelais—like any authentic poet—(to the French, too, even if they are not aware of it) is the labyrinth of fantasy in all its beauty and freedom; it is the deeply pleasurable journey through the immeasurable richness of the imagination. In the absence of all the references [provided by commentators], we would find it equally captivating …56

54 55 56

Georg Pfeffer, “Deux notices inédites de Johann Gottlob Regis,” Revue des études rabelaisiennes 3.1 (1905): 72–79. Letter to Carus, 1818, quoted by Pfeffer, 433–434. Although highlighting the German philological tradition, this comment bears the seed

562

kammerer

Regis, in his eagerness to be absolutely faithful to Rabelais’s text, opted for a deliberately archaic language that included a very large number of regionalisms. Gargamelle, “fille du roy des Parpaillos, belle gouge et de bonne troigne”, becomes Gurgelmilte, die Tochter des Königs der Millermahler, ein schönes Trüserle, hübschen Visiers: Gurgelmilte and Trüserle hübschen Visiers are taken from the Geschichtklitterung; the dialect word “parpaillot” is rendered by a Strasbourg dialect term, Millermahler.57 Regis shared with his Romantic contemporaries a taste for the natural, the primitive, the quirky, and the eccentric; he was shocked neither by the bawdiness of Rabelais, neither by an esthetic that might seem strange, and endeavored to render them as best he could, in particular by coining numerous neologisms. His translation is said to have enriched the German lexicon by at least 5000 words.58 Regis’s translation was well received in Germany by Ludwig Tieck,59 then by several contemporary German journals. Gustav von Below, adjutant to Friedrich Wilhelm iv and a great connoisseur of Rabelais, spoke of a “new triumph of the German art of translation” and obtained for Regis an annual pension of 300 talents, as well as the title of doctor honoris causa at the University of Breslau in 1841. The response was more circumspect in France—if the monumental work was noticed at all: Brunet speaks somewhat ambiguously of Regis’s “Germanic tenacity”;60 several decades later, Sainéan was critical of Regis’s growing predilection for archaisms and his taste for Fischart (for whom Sainéan had only moderate regard).61 But Regis’s translation and commentary were used by William Francis Smith, the English successor of Urquhart and Le Motteux.

57

58

59 60 61

of a (false?) opposition between ‘positivists’ and partisans of polysemy, which has dominated Rabelaisian studies lately. See Elsa Kammerer, Hélène Boisson, “Traduction inédite de l’Avant-propos hypothétique de Gottlob Regis à sa traduction de Rabelais (1832–1841),” forthcoming. Sainéan, “Les interprètes de Rabelais,” 242. On this text, Kammerer, “Toute de miel: La Gargamelle de Johann Fischart (1575–1590),” in Textes au corps: Promenades et musardises sur les terres de Marie Madeleine Fontaine, eds. D. Kahn, E. Kammerer, A.-H. Klinger-Dollé, M. Molins, and A.-P. Pouey-Mounou (Geneva: 2015), 33–49. Pfeffer, “Deux notices inédites,” 437. According to Sainéan, it was “often artificial,” even “sometimes simply pedantic,” and could only be read by scholars (Sainéan, “Les interprètes de Rabelais,” 243–244). This is also the opinion of Weigand, who also considers Regis’s work to be among the “Meisterwercken deutscher Übersetzungskunst” (foreword to the second edition of Regis’s text in 1911). And yet even Jean Paul had felt that a German translation of Rabelais could only be aimed at specialists of the French language and not at a broader audience. Pfeffer, “Deux notices inédites,” 436. Brunet, Essais d’ études bibliographiques sur Rabelais, v. Sainéan, “Les interprètes de Rabelais,” 241.

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

563

His New Translation with Notes, published in London in 1893, was also intended to be absolutely faithful to the text—although he left five entire chapters in French, deeming them to be too obscene, and printed only the first and last letters of words he judged too indecent. Abundant notes accompany his translation. Just as Wieringa had made use of German and English translations by Fischart and Urquhart, Smith used the French and German texts of Le Duchat and Regis to help him with his English translation and commentary. Clearly translators did not have a purely one-to-one relationship with Rabelais’s text, making use of other translations and editions from elsewhere in Europe. Fischart’s use of entrelardement in translation remained unique, whereas Regis’s monumental work seems initially—before the establishment of the Études rabelaisiennes and the major early 19th-century French critical editions—to have summed up all the possible interpretations of Rabelais’s works. Both texts nevertheless continued to constitute a treasure trove for their successors, as well as representing certain excesses that they were eager to avoid. Where Regis admired Fischart’s comic power and inexhaustible semantic richness, Ferdinand Adolf Gelbcke (1812–1892), when he translated Gargantua and Pantagruel in the late 19th century (Leipzig, 1879), retained Rabelais’s and Fischart’s satire on society, science, the Church, and politics, but explicitly rejected their “grotesque, fantastic, and ridiculous style.” The aim of his translation, significantly expurgated and intended to be read without notes, was not “esthetic delight” but “moral correction.” As the text was meant to be immediately understood, he adopted the opposite approach to Regis: instead of archaic language and erudition, he opted for clarity (even if it often involved simplification) and the use of contemporary language. In the early 20th century, at the time when Spitzer published his thesis on Rabelais’s style, Wilhelm Weigand, who simultaneously republished Bode’s great translation of Montaigne, fulfilled Regis’s express wish to provide a new edition of his translation in which the notes and commentaries seen as indispensable would be shortened and placed at the foot of the page; the emphasis was to be on the “artistic raw material” and not on the expression of ideas. This first edition, aimed at bibliophiles alone, was so successful that Weigand decided to produce a second in 1911, and even a third in 1923, further corrected thanks to Abel Lefranc’s new edition, and partially retouched: in particular, Weigand provided an entirely reworked translation of the “Propos des bien yvres.” It was this revised version of Regis’s translation that the Romanist Ludwig Schrader, with a specialist audience in mind, republished in 1964, only discreetly modernizing its spelling and punctuation, explaining obsolete terms used by Regis, and adding a critical appendix based on the editions of Lefranc, Marichal, Jourda, and on the latest scholarship. This Regis-Schrader edition,

564

kammerer

which was reprinted in 2015, constitutes a welcome addition to the translations by Gelbcke (1879), Hegaur-Owlglass (1905–1909), Widmer-Horst (1968), and Steinsieck-Hausmann (1992–2013).62

9

Late Beginnings in Italy (1886–1887)

Unlike what happened in Germany, England, and the Netherlands, the first programmatic translation of Rabelais in Italy came very late (1886–1887),63 despite the fact that Rabelais had a sometimes decisive influence on Italian literary output from the 16th century onwards; indeed this influence grew even stronger over the centuries.64 So why did the first translation arrive so late? We will accord little credit to the argument put forward by the first modern critic of Rabelais in Italy, Martinozzi, who claimed that the proud supremacy of Italian letters in the 16th and 17th centuries had resulted in a certain disdain for foreign languages.65 Another argument brought forward in 1879 was that Rabelais is impossible to translate because of the difficulty of his language and his “solemn and mischievous” spirit;66 and yet Montaigne, whose language is also fraught with difficulties, was translated into Italian as far back as 1590. The fact that Rabelais was placed on the Index is not a strong argument either, insofar as the same fate did not prevent the Essais from being rapidly translated. It was also said that Italians who wanted to read Rabelais could use the original text; but other authors who were just as widely read as Rabelais in Italy were translated well before he was. The reason for this lateness is possibly to be found in the perception of the religious dimension of Rabelais’s romans in Italy. Rabelais’s religious stance, which was fiercely anticlerical, anti-theological, and anti-dogmatic, doubtless sparked mistrust among Italian readers—more so than his supposed atheism and materialism, which have also been put forward as explanations (especially before the publication in Italian of Lucien Febvre’s Le Problème de l’incroyance au xvie siècle in 1978). It is thus plausible that Rabelais’s “dubbia cattolicità” may have made Italian readers wary of, or

62 63

64 65 66

On German translations of Rabelais, see Kammerer, Copia ridiculorum. At the same time (1884), a selection of texts was published in Denmark (for the bicentennial of the birth of Baron Ludvig Holberg, an admirer of Rabelais during the Enlightenment). The complete five-volume Danish translation was not published until the end of World War 2, however. Tetel, Rabelais et l’ Italie. Giuseppe Martinozzi, Il Pantagruel di Francesco Rabelais (Lodi: 1882). Olindo Guerrini, “Rabelais in Italia,” Rassegna Settimanale 55 (January 1879): 52–54.

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

565

at least indifferent to, the idea of Gargantua et Pantagruel being published in their own language.67 And yet a partial translation, along with an imitation of the catalogue of the Saint-Victor Library, a chapter that was especially popular in the modern era (as evidenced, for instance, by De Dene’s Testament and Fischart’s Catalogus), appeared at the end of the 17th century, written by the Genoan Francesco Fulvio Frugoni (1620–before 1689).68 Like De Dene’s work in Bruges a century earlier, this was what we might term a “free-flowing” translation. The seven volumes of Il Cane di Diogene (1689) each contain a dozen “tales” that are descriptions of contemporary life and customs, broadly inspired by Rabelais, whom Frugoni explicitly refers to, placing him alongside two other masters of satire, Petronius, and Lucian. When he visits the island of the “Gastromargiti,” in the fifth book (v. 100 sqq.: Frugoni combines the episode of the “Andouilles” with that of Gaster), Mercury visits the library, which contains several “volumi d’alta grassa,” many of which come directly from Saint-Victor and also provide the basis for a satirical exploration of contemporary mores and vices. Frugoni, like Fischart, mostly translates using amplification or periphrasis. As he does so, he eliminates all precise references to the Catholic Church—at the expense, naturally, of the text’s overall satirical verve.69 The first translation of Gargantua, by the Neapolitan doctor Gennaro Perfetto, alias Janunculus, only appeared in 1886–1887, dedicated to “non-erudite readers” and published in a collection that included Henri Estienne’s Apologie pour Hérodote, Béroalde de Verville’s Le Moyen de parvenir and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.70 This translation was contemporaneous with the emergence of modern Italian criticism of Rabelais; although it clearly sought to take a different route from the great annotated editions by Le Duchat and Regis, it was the translation of a text that had already become an object of study, not merely that of a text for reading:71 its motivations are thus very different from those that lie behind modern era-translations. Reworked and augmented with Pantagruel

67 68

69 70

71

See comments on Guerrini, “Rabelais in Italia,” in Ferdinando Neri, Rabelais e il suo tempo (Turin: 1948), 83. Tetel, Rabelais et l’ Italie, 122–125, as well as appendix ii, 293–295, combined presentation of Rabelais’s and Frugoni’s texts. Ezio Raimondi, “Un lettore barocco di Rabelais,” Convivium 25.2 (1957): 149–163. Frugoni also paraphrases the words in praise of debts uttered by Panurge in the Tiers livre. Le Opere di Francesco Rabelais per la prima volta tradotte in lingua italiana da Janunculus (Naples: 1886–1887). Gaetano Amalfi, “La prima versione italiana del Rabelais,” in Grandi e Piccoli (Naples: 1900), 179–190. Paola Cifarelli, “Le Quart Livre et ses traductions italiennes,” in Langue et sens du Quart Livre, ed. F. Giacone (Paris: 2012), 13–25. Tetel, Rabelais et l’ Italie, 220–225.

566

kammerer

and the Tiers livre in 1914 (Perfetto would go no further), it was reprinted several times between 1914 and 1928.72 Its success prompted an anonymous adaptation (more than a translation) of the Prognostication and several partial translations of the tales of the giants. The first complete translation of the pentalogy, by Gildo Passini, who also translated Balzac, Diderot, and Montesquieu and wrote plays and essays, was published as late as 1930. Recognized as especially scrupulous, it was republished in 2012.73 Following several further partial translations, the second complete translation, published in 1953–1959,74 was the work of an academic, Mario Bonfantini, who was also a critic, the author of several essays on French and Italian literature, and a translator of Molière, Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire, and Proust. It met with considerable success and was constantly republished until 2004. The translation by Augusto Frassineti, made in 1980 on the basis of the Boulenger edition, has received many international awards; it is especially praised for its “artistic” character.75 The latest translations in the “Classici della Letteratura Europea” collection (2012) return, perhaps unknowingly, to Jean Paul’s idea, adopting a bilingual layout based on the Pléiade edition edited by Mireille Huchon in 1994, although its orientation is clearly academic: the first two books were translated by Lionello Sozzi, and the Quart livre by Paola Ciffarelli.76

10

Late Translations in Spain (1905–1930)

In Spain, the first translations of Rabelais appeared also very late.77 In 1905 Eduardo Barrobiero Herran (1875–1939) published a Spanish translation of

72

73 74 75 76 77

Le opere di Francesco Rabelais per la prima volta tradotte in lingua italiana (Naples: 1886– 1887); Le opere di Francesco Rabelais tradotte e precedute da uno studio su Rabelais e i suoi tempi, I. Gargantua (Naples: 1914–1928). In this second edition, Perfetto reworked his translation of Gargantua based on Lefranc’s critical edition. The long introduction he added in 1924 is one of the most important Italian critical studies of Rabelais. Gargantua e Pantagruele (Rome: 1925–1930; 2012), 5 vol. Gargantua e Pantagruele (Torino: 1953), 2 vol.; Gargantua e capitoli scelti degli altri quattro libri (Naples: 1959). Gargantua e Pantagruele, trans. A. Frassineti (Florence: 1980; 1993); bilingual edition: Gargantua e Pantagruele, trans. A. Frassineti (Milan: 1984), 3 vols. Gargantua e Pantagruele, trans. L. Sozzi (Milan: 2012). Quart Livre di Rabelais (1552), trans. P. Ciffarelli (Milan: 2012). Caridad Martínez, “Introducción a las traducciones de Rabelais a las lenguas hispánicas,” in Transferencias de temas, transferencias de textos: Mitos, leyendas y lenguas entre

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

567

Gargantua,78 at the same time writing a series of essays on Don Quixote to mark his quadricentennial; the success of Rabelais in Spain thus arose from an encounter between Gargantua and Don Quixote. Between 1905 and 1910, Barrobiero translated the other books of the pentalogy. But his revised Gargantua was only published in 1910—the first of the six planned volumes, the last of which was to include a Glosario and a Vocabulario. The definitive edition was published in Madrid in 1923 and dedicated to Anatole France.79 Barrobiero then edited the collection entitled “Quevedo. Anécdotas y decires” for the Compañía Iberoamericana de Publicationes, whose titles were widely distributed in South America. It included a selection of excerpts from Gargantua published under the title Episodios rabelesianos (1930). Referred to in 1935 by the Aragonese anarchist Felipe Alaiz as a “contertulio de Rabelais,” Barriobero undertook a “Rabelaisian” interpretation of Spanish current affairs, embodying a fusion and possible reconciliation between the “stoical and Dionysian dimensions” of Civil War Spain. Barriobero was shot by the Franquistas in 1939. Rabelais, whose works were associated with the Republican intellectual avant-garde, was thus finally silenced by Franco. Several later translations drew significantly, without admitting as much, from Barriobero.80 From the 1960s on—the Bakhtin effect was doubtless a factor81—there was a real “boom” in Spanish translations.82 This continued until 2011, when the latest complete translation by Gabriel Hormaechea was published to much critical acclaim.83 The first translation of Gargantua in Catalan, made by Lluís Faraudo de Sangermán (pseudonym Lluís Deztany), was also very late (1908): the reason is possibly to be found in a climate of ecclesiastical and governmental intolerance

78

79 80 81 82 83

Cataluña y Languedoc, eds. Marie-Madeleine Fragonard and Caridad Martínez (Barcelona: 1997), 105–115. Rabelais. Gargantua, prima versione castillana, con un studio critico-biografico, notas y un vocabulario explicativo de algunas palabras ambiguas y nombres emblematicos (Madrid: 1906). Vol. i: Gargantúa y Pantagruel; vol. ii: Hechos y dichos heroicos del buen Pantagruel; vol. iii: Pantagruel, rey de los Dipsodas. Julián Bravo Vega, “Eduardo Barriobero, primer traductor español de Rabelais,” https://​ dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/1011606.pdf (2003): 513–524. Xus Ugarte-Ballester, “Oubli versus prolifération de Maître François Rabelais dans la Péninsule Ibérique,” Bulletin hispanique 115.2 (2013): 493–506. Demerson and Marrache-Gouraud, François Rabelais, 360–381. Gargantúa y Pantagruel: Los cinco libros (Acantilado: 2011). See Gabriel Hormaechea, “Traducir a Rabelais,” 1611. Revista de historia de la traducción 6 (2012), http://www.traduccion literaria.org/1611/art/hormaechea.htm.

568

kammerer

at that time. It was produced at the same time as Barriobero’s great undertaking, but the intentions behind it were very different. Faraudo was a soldier, a bibliophile, a Francophile, a medievalist, and a translator. His approach was rooted in Noucentism, a cultural and political movement that began in Catalonia in the early 20th century and aimed to reintroduce Catalan language and culture into universal culture after four centuries of decline. Convinced that France owed its grandeur to the pre-eminence of Occitan culture and language with respect to Germanic culture and fascinated by the number of Occitanisms in Rabelais (he held that Rabelais’s language was more closely related to Catalan than to 20th-century French), Faraudo too began by translating the Pantagrueline prognostication (Pronòstich pantagruelí, 1909), announcing the gradual publication of Rabelais’s complete works. He seems to have translated the five Livres, but they were not all published owing to a series of postponements and editorial difficulties. Les grans e inestimables cròniques were published in 1909; the Pedagogical council of the Diputació of Barcelona published the chapters devoted to the education of the giants in 1918 (L’educació de Gargantuá i la joventut de Pantagruel). In 1919, the manuscript of Gargantua was at the printers, but Faraudo himself halted the printing because of the “audacious style” of the accompanying notes. Gargantua, which earned him a place in the Société des Études Rabelaisiennes, was not finally published until 1929, in a bibliophile’s edition of 150 copies. In an attempt to restore Catalan, the sister of the Provençal language, from which Rabelais “faithfully” borrowed, to its former glory, Faraudo strove, like Fischart, Urquhart, and Regis, to render the archaism of Rabelais’s language by adopting an archaic style. He also planned to produce a Rabelaisian-French-Catalan glossary, and to assemble his notes to produce a dictionary of medieval Catalan.84 In the preamble to the notes accompanying the 1929 edition of Gargantua, Faraudo announced the forthcoming publication of the four other books of the pentalogy; but they were to remain in manuscript form. Only in 1985 did the first complete Catalan translation of Rabelais’s works appear. It is the work of a professional translator, Miquel Àngel Sánchez Férriz, commissioned by the Catalan publisher Edicions 62, for the collection entitled Les millors obres de la literatura universal. Surprisingly, this new translation was very poorly received. By contrast, the Catalan translation by the literary translator and author Emili Olcina Aya, published in 2011, met with considerable success.

84

Ugarte-Ballester, “Oubli versus prolifération.”

rabelais (not) translated (16th–21st centuries)

569

Rabelais was published for the first time in Portuguese in 1945;85 the first translation in Galician, by Enrique Harguindey Banet, is very recent (1981– 2004).86

∵ Translation is always a challenge. Rabelais’s mischievous erudition, his incredible verbal inventiveness, and his desire to make his readers laugh throw into sharp relief the linguistic, philological, esthetic, hermeneutic, and epistemological challenges inherent in translating his work. In the 20th and 21st centuries, a very large number of translations appeared, either new translations in languages into which Rabelais had already been translated (German, English, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Russian), or first translations in other languages.87 Unlike the translations of the 16th and 17th centuries, however, they are based on critical editions whose precision allows a better understanding of the original and encourages a more exact rendering in the target language. But at the same time, they make translators run the risk of losing the original meaning of the “letter” of Rabelais’s work.88 In the modern era, the first translations of Rabelais were all based on non-annotated (first or new) editions, in their ‘raw’ state, so to speak—objects of pleasure, not of study. They were no doubt lucky to have arrived before the growing influence of philology on the great founding texts of European literature. Moreover, the target languages are now standardized and established, which was not the case for Fischart’s German, nor Urquhart’s English; their reinventions of Rabelais came at a precise point in the history of vernacular languages: besides the pleasure it assuredly afforded them, Rabelais’s work was an opportunity to experiment with their own language, with all the freedom Rabelais allowed himself with respect to French. Their works thus occupy a very special place in the long history of Rabelaisian translation: more than translations, they are re-creations. Preceding as they did the first major critical edition by Le Duchat—itself produced outside France—it was indeed as re-creations of Rabelais’s roman that these translations brought it into the European literary canon. 85

86 87 88

Hervé Baudry, “Rabelais et le Portugal,” in Rabelais pour le xxie siècle. Actes du Colloque du Centre d’Etudes supérieures de la Renaissance, Chinon-Tours, 1994, ed. M. Simonin (er) 33 (Geneva: 1998), 389–403. Gargantúa e Pantagruel (Santiago de Compostela: 1981). Demerson and Marrache-Gouraud, François Rabelais, 59–89. Antoine Bermann, La traduction et la lettre ou l’ auberge du lointain (Paris: 1999), 118–122.

Bibliography Works by François Rabelais Major French Editions Individual Texts Gargantua, première édition critique faite sur l’editio princeps, eds. R. Calder, M. Screech, and V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1970). Gargantua, fac-similé de l’édition définitive de 1542, ed. C. Gaignebet (Alfortville: 1971). Gargantua, édition critique sur le texte de l’édition publiée en 1535 à Lyon par François Juste, ed. G. Defaux (Paris: 1994). Gargantua. Texte original et translation en français moderne, ed. G. Demerson (Paris: 1996). Gargantua, ed. M. Huchon (Paris: 2007). Pantagruel, première publication critique sur le texte original, ed. V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1965). Pantagruel, ed. P. Michel (Paris: 1973). Pantagruel, ed. N. Cazauran (Paris: 1990). Pantagruel, édition critique sur le texte de l’édition publiée en 1534 à Lyon par François Juste, ed. G. Defaux (Paris: 1994). Pantagruel. Texte original et translation en français moderne, ed. G. Demerson (Paris: 1996). Le Tiers livre, ed. M.A. Screech (Geneva: 1964). Le Tiers Livre, ed. P. Michel (Paris: 1973). Le Tiers livre, édition critique sur le texte publié en 1552 à Paris par Michel Fezandat, ed. J. Céard (Paris: 1995). Le Tiers Livre. Texte original et translation en français moderne, ed. G. Demerson (Paris: 1997). Le Quart livre, ed. R. Marichal (Geneva: 1947). Le Quart livre de Pantagruel (édition partielle, Lyon, 1548), ed. J. Plattard (Paris: 1909). Le Quart livre, édition critique sur le texte des éditions publiées en 1548 à Lyon par Pierre de Tours et en 1552 à Paris par Michel Fezandat, eds. G. Defaux and R. Marichal (Paris: 1994). Le Quart Livre. Texte original et translation en français moderne, ed. G. Demerson (Paris: 1997). Le Quart livre, ed. M. Huchon (Paris: 1998). Le Cinquième Livre. Texte original et translation en français moderne, ed. G. Demerson (Paris: 1997). Chronicques du grant Roy Gargantua, Pantagruel, Pantagrueline prognostication, eds. A. Parent-Charron, O. Pédeflous (Paris: 2018).

572

bibliography

Pantagrueline prognostication pour l’an 1533 avec les almanachs pour les ans 1533, 1535 et 1541. La grande et vraye prognostication nouvelle de 1544, ed. M.A. Screech (Geneva: 1974). La Grande et Vraye Pronostication nouvelle pour l’an 1544, ed. L. Scheler (Paris: 1947). “La Grande Pronostication pour lan Mil cinq cens quarant et ung: Une pronostication portant l’anagramme de Rabelais et inconnue aux rabelaisants,” ed. M.A. Screech, er 15 (1980): 179–200. Almanach pour l’an m.d.xxxv, ed. A. Vitale-Brovarone (Paris: 2014). Lettres écrites d’Italie par François Rabelais, ed. V.-L. Bourrilly (Paris: 1910). “Des épîtres-dédicaces des œuvres de Manardi et de Marliani, du Testament de Cuspidius, des lettres à Geoffroy d’Estissac, de La Sciomachie et des suppliques,” in R. Cooper, Rabelais et l’Italie, (er) 24 (Geneva: 1991).

Complete Works Les Œuvres de M. François Rabelais, augmentées de la vie de l’auteur & de quelques remarques sur sa vie & sur l’histoire; avec l’explication de tous les mots difficiles (Amsterdam: 1663). Œuvres de Maître François Rabelais. Publiées sous le titre de Faits et dits du géant Gargantua et de son fils Pantagruel, avec la Prognostication pantagrueline, l’epître du Limosin, La Crême philosophale, et deux épîtres à deux vieilles, de mœurs et d’humeurs différentes. Nouvelle édition où l’on a ajouté des remarques historiques et critiques, eds. J. Le Duchat and B. La Monnoye (Amsterdam: 1711). Le Rabelais moderne, ou les Œuvres de Maître François Rabelais, docteur en Médecine, mises à la portée de la plupart des lecteurs, avec des Eclercissemens historiques pour l’intelligence des allégories contenuës dans le Gargantua et dans le Pantagruel, ed. l’abbé De Marsy (Amsterdam: 1752). Œuvres de Rabelais. Edition variorum, augmentée de pièces inédites, des Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, ouvrage posthume, avec l’explication en regard; des remarques de Le Duchat, de Bernier, de Le Motteux, de l’Abbé de Marsy, de Voltaire, de Ginguené […] et d’un nouveau commentaire historique et philologique, eds. E. and E. Johanneau (Dalibon: 1823). Œuvres de Rabelais, collationnées pour la première fois sur les éditions originales, accompagnées de notes nouvelles et ramenées à une orthographe qui facilite la lecture, eds. J.H. Burgaud des Marets and E. Rathery (Paris: 1857–1858). Les quatre livres de Maistre François Rabelais, suivis du manuscrit du cinquième livre, eds. A. de Montaiglon and L. Lacour (Paris: 1868–1872). Les Œuvres de maistre François Rabelais accompagnées d’une notice sur sa vie et ses ouvrages, d’une étude bibliographique, de variantes, d’un commentaire, d’une table des noms propres et d’un glossaire, ed. C. Marty-Laveaux (Paris: 1868–1903). Œuvres. Gargantua, Pantagruel, Tiers livre et Quart livre [chap. i–xvii], eds. A. Lefranc,

bibliography

573

J. Boulenger, H. Clouzot, P. Dorveaux, J. Plattard, and L. Sainéan (Paris: 1912– 1931; Geneva: 1955). Œuvres complètes, eds. J. Boulenger and L. Scheler (Paris: 1953). Œuvres complètes, ed. M. Guilbaud (Paris: 1957). Œuvres complètes, ed. P. Jourda (Paris: 1962). Œuvres complètes, ed. G. Demerson (Paris: 1973, 1995). Œuvres complètes, eds. M. Huchon and F. Moreau (Paris: 1994). Les cinq livres, eds. J. Céard, G. Defaux, and M. Simonin (Paris: 1994).

Other Texts Les chroniques de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, ed. P. Lacroix (Paris: 1872). Le Vroy Gargantua, réimprimé d’après l’exemplaire unique de la Bibliothèque Nationale, ed. M. Françon (Paris: 1949). Les Chroniques admirables du puissant roy Gargantua, eds. M. Françon and H. Dontenville (Tours: 1956). Le Disciple de Pantagruel (Les Navigations de Panurge), eds. G. Demerson and Ch. Lauvergnat-Gagnière (Paris: 1982). Les Chroniques gargantuines, eds. C. Lauvergnat-Gagnière, and G. Demerson (Paris: 1989).

Major English Editions The Works of François Rabelais, ed. T. Urquhart (London: 1653, 1693). Pantagruel’s prognostication certain true ans infallible for the year everlasting … set forth long since by that famous well wisher to the Mathematicks and Doctor in Physik, Francis Rabelais, ed. F.P. Wilson (Oxford: 1947). The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, ed. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: 1955). The Portable Rabelais, ed. S. Putnam (Harmondsworth: 1979). The Complete Works of François Rabelais, ed. D.M. Frame (Berkeley: 1991, 1999). Gargantua and Pantagruel, ed. M.A. Screech (New York: 2006).

Other Primary Texts Anonymous. Articella cum commento (Lyon: 1527). Anonymous. La terrible et merveilleuse vie de Robert le Diable (Lyon: 1496). Anonymous. Miracle de Nostre-Dame, de Robert le Diable, ed. Société des Antiquaires de Normandie (Rouen: 1836). Apian, Pierre. La Cosmographie (Anvers: 1544). Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando furioso, ed. L. Caretti (1966; repr. Turin: 1971). Aristotle. The Politics, trans. C. Lord (Chicago: 1984).

574

bibliography

Barth, Caspar. “Lyricorum Libri ii,” in Fabularum Aesopiarum Libri v (Frankfurt: 1623; repr. 1982). Boccaccio, Giovanni. Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, trans. J. Solomon, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: 2011). Bodin, Jean. Les six livres de la République avec l’Apologie de R. Herpin (1583; repr. Aalen: 1977). Boétie, Etienne de la. Discours de la servitude volontaire followed by Les Paradoxes de la Servitude volontaire, eds. A. and L. Tournon (Paris: 2002). Boiardo, Matteo Maria. Orlando innamorato (Bologna: 2011) http://www.torrossa.com/​ resources/an/2483782. Bourbon, Nicolas. Nugae (1533), ed. S. Laigneau (Geneva: 2008). Bovelles, Charles de. Liber de differentia vulgarium linguarum et Gallici sermonis varietate (Paris: 1533). Brouault, Jean. Traité de l’eau de vie ou anatomie theorique et pratique du vin (Paris: 1646). Budé, Guillaume. Commentarii linguae graecae (Paris: 1529). Budé, Guillaume. De Asse (Paris: 1514). Budé, Guillaume. G. Budæi Parisiensis […] De Transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum, Libri tres (Paris: 1535). Budé, Guillaume. Le livre de l’institution du prince (Kap. 1-xx). Nach der Ausgabe von Paris 1548 herausgegeben, mit den Ausgaben von l’Arrivour und Lyon (1547) verglichen, übersetzt und kommentiert, ed. M. Marin (New York: 1983). Budé, Guillaume. Opera omnia (Upper Saddle River: 1969). Calmet, Augustin. “Sur les géans,” in La Sainte Bible en latin et en françois, vol. 1 (Paris: 1748). Calvin, John. Des Scandales (1550), eds. O. Fatio and C. Rapin (Geneva: 1984). Celsus, Aulus C. De re medica libri octo (Paris: 1529). Chéreau, Ollivier. Le jargon ou langage de l’argot reformé (1631), ed. D. Delaplace (Paris: 2008). Colonna, Francesco. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice: 1499). Coquillart, Guillaume. Les Œuvres, ed. M. Freeman (Geneva: 1975). Correspondance du Cardinal Jean Du Bellay, ed. R. Scheurer, vol. 1 (Paris: 1969). Corrozet, Gilles. Hecatomgraphie (Paris: 1540). Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: 1611). De Lille, Pierre. Tria calendaria parva Petri lillani Borboniensis … (Poitiers: 1529). Dolet, Étienne. Carmina (1538), ed. C. Langlois-Pézeret (Geneva: 2009). Dolet, Étienne. Stephani Doleti Galli Aurelii Carminum libri quatuor (Lyon: 1538). Du Bellay, Joachim. Les Regrets, précédé de Les Antiquités de Rome, et suivi de La Défense et illustration de la langue française, ed. S. de Sacy (Paris: 1967). Du Bellay, Joachim. The Defence and Illustration of the French Language (1549) in Poetry and Language in 16th-Century France, trans. L. Willett (Toronto: 2003).

bibliography

575

Du Bellay, Martin, and Guillaume du Bellay. Mémoires de Martin et Guillaume du Bellay, ed. V.-L. Bourrilly and F. Vindry (Paris: 1912). Du Fail, Noël. Propos rustiques, eds. G.A. Pérouse and R. Dubuis (Geneva: 1994). Du Puy-Herbault, Gabriel. Theotimus, sive de tollendis et expungendis malis libris (Paris: 1549). Erasmus, “Appendix descriptive Jodie Clithovei,” in Opera omnia, ed. J. Leclerc, vol. 10 (Hildesheim: 1962). Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus, trans. B.I. Knott-Sharpe and J.N. Grant, vol. 36 (Toronto: 2006). Erasmus, Complaint of Peace (Querela pacis), trans. B. Radice, in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. A.H.T. Levi, vol. 27 (Toronto: 1986). Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. and eds. N.M. Cheshire and M.J. Heath, in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. A.H.T. Levi, vol. 27 (Toronto: 1986). Erasmus. Colloques, ed. and trans. E. Wolff (Paris: 1992). Erasmus. Œuvres choisies, eds. and trans. C. Blum, A. Godin, J.-C. Margolin, and D. Ménager (Paris: 1992). Erasmus. Praise of Folly, ed. A.H.T. Levi (London: 1993). Erasmus. The Praise of Folly, ed. R.M. Adams (New York: 1989). Estienne, Charles. L’agriculture et maison rustique de MM. Charles Estienne et Jean Liebault, docteurs en Medecine (Lyon: 1583). Estienne, Henri. Deux dialogues du nouveau langage françois italianizé (Antwerp: 1579). Fischart, Johann. Catalogus catalogorum perpetuo durabilis (Strasbourg: 1590), ed. M. Schilling (Tübingen: 1993). Folengo, Teofilo. Baldo [sic], ed. A.E. Mullaney, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 2007–2008). Foulweather, Adam. A wonderful, strange, and miraculous astrological prognostication for this year of our Lord God 1591 (London: 1592). Fuchs, Leonhart. Errata recentiorum medicorum lx. numero, adjectis eorundem confutationibus, in Studiosorum gratiam, jam primum ædita. Leonardo Fuchsio Medico, Authore (Haguenau: 1530). Galen. Galeni Ars Medicinalis per Joannem Manardum versa, divinisque Commentariolis adeo docte illustrata, ut Clarissimus Leonicenus, omnesque alii superiores interpretes, inscitiæ plane convicti sint (Rome: 1525). Galen. Galeni in librum Hippocratis De victus ratione in morbis acutis Commentarii quatuor. Joanne Vasseo Meldensi interprete (Paris: 1531). Galen. Method of medicine. Books 5–9, eds. and trans. I. Johnston and G.H.R. Horsley (Cambridge-London: 2011). Galen. On the Constitution of Medicine, The Art of Medicine, A Method of Medicine to Glaucon, ed. and trans. I. Johnston (Cambridge-London: 2016). Galen. γαληνου Α’- Υ’- Δ’. Galeni librorum pars prima-tertia-quarta (Venice: 1525– 1526).

576

bibliography

Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, trans. G.W. Most (Cambridge, MA: 2006). Hippocrates. Works, trans. W.H.S. Jones, vol. 2 (Cambridge-London: 1981). Hippocrates. Works, trans. W.D. Smith, vol. 7 (Cambridge-London: 1994). Hippocrates. Prædictiones sive pronostica Hippocratis Laurentio Laurentiano Florentino et Guilielmo Copo Basiliensi interpretibus. Claudii Galeni commentarii in easdem eodem Laurentiano interprete (Paris: 1516). Hippocrates. Hippocratis ac Galeni libri aliquot, ex recognitione Francisci Rabelæsi, medici omnibus numeris absolutissimi: quorum elenchum sequens pagella incabit (Lyon: 1532). Hippocrates. Hippocratis Coi medicorum facile principis de natura humana libellus Medicinæ candidatis multò utilissimus, unì cum Claudii Galeni Commentario, Hermanno Cruserio Campensi interprete (Paris: 1531). Hippocrates. Hippocratis Coi medicorum omnium principis Περὶ γονῆς De Genitura. Περὶ φύσιος παιδίου De Natura pueri Interprete Joanne Gorræo Parisiensi Doctore medico. Accesserunt ejusdem interpretis annotationes in eosdem libellos: in quarum quinquagesimanona, tota temporum pariendi ratio apertissimè explicatur (Paris: 1545). Hippocrates. Hippocratis Coi, De aëre, aquis, et locis libellus Ejusdem, de flatibus Græce et Latine Jano Cornario Zuiccaviense Interprete (Basel: 1529). Hippocrates. Hippocratis medicorum omnium longe principis Epidemiorum Liber Sextus jam recens Latinitate donatus, Leonardo Fuchsio interprete (Haguenau: 1532). Homer. Odyssey, trans. A.T. Murray, ed. G.E. Dimock, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 1995). Krantz, Albrecht. Saxonia (Cologne: 1520). La Croix Du Maine, François Grudé. Premier volume de la Bibliotheque du sieur de La Croix Du Maine (Paris: 1584). La farce des théologastres, ed. C. Longeon (Geneva: 1989). La Vigne, André de. Le mystère de Saint Martin, ed. A. Duplat (Geneva: 1979). Le recueil Florence: 53 farces imprimées à Paris vers 1515, ed. J. Koopmans (Orléans: 2011). Le recueil Trepperel: Les sotties, ed. E. Droz (Paris: 1935). Le Roy, Antoine. Floretum philosophicum (Paris: 1649). Le Testu, Guillaume. Cosmographie Universelle. Selon les navigateurs tant anciens que modernes par Guillaume Le Testu pillotte en la mer du Ponent, de la ville françoyse de Grace, ed. F. Lestringant (Paris: 2012). Lemnius, Levinus. Les occultes merveilles et secrets de nature (Paris: 1574). Linacre, Thomas. De emendata structura Latini sermonis (London: 1524; Paris: 1532). Lucian of Samosata. Works, ed. and trans. K. Kilburn, vol. 6 (London: 1959). Lucian of Samosata. “‘How to Write History’ (De ratione conscribendæ historiæ),” in Works, ed. and trans. K. Kilburn, vol. 8 (Cambridge, MA: 1959), 1–74. Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince, trans. H.C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: 1985). Magnus, Olaus. Carta Marina et descriptio septemtrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium rerum in eis contentarum diligentissime elaborata. Anno Dni 1539 (Venice: 1539).

bibliography

577

Manardo, Giovanni. Joannis Manardi Ferrariensis Medici Epistolarum medicinalium Tomus Secundus nunquam antea in Gallia excusus, ed. F. Rabelais (Lyon: 1532). Manardo, Giovanni. Joannis Manardi Medici Ferrariensis, hac ætate omnium medicinæ professorum per universam Italiam, in Galeni doctrina et Arabum censura celeberrimi, et optime meriti, Epistolarum Medicinalium libri duodeviginti (Basel: 1535). Marot, Clément. Œuvres complètes, ed. F. Rigolot (Paris: 2009). Ménard, Jean. Declaration de la reigle et estat des Cordeliers (Geneva: 1542). Montaigne, Michel de. Essais, eds. P. Villey and V.-L. Saulnier (Paris: 1965). Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. C. Cotton (Digireads.com Publishing: 2009). More, Thomas. La Republicque d’Utopie (Lyon: 1559). Munster, Sebastian. Cosmographia (Basel: 1544). Munster, Sebastian. Hebraica Biblia (Basel: 1534). Nanni, Giovanni. Commentaria fratris Joannis Annii Viterbiensis super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium (Rome: 1498). Nieuwe Pronosticatie […] decalculeert by Lieripe (Antwerp: 1561), modern edition, in H. Van Kampen, H. Pleij et al. (eds.), Het zal koud zijn in ‘t water als ‘t vriest. Zestiendeeeuwe parodieën op gedrukte jaarvoorspellingen (The Hague: 1980), 162–187. Ovid. Metamorphoses, trans. F.J. Miller, ed. G.P. Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 1977; repr. 1994). Pagnino, Sante. Thesaurus linguae sanctae (Lyon: 1529). Palsgrave, John. L’esclarcissement de la langue françoyse (London: 1530), ed. and trans. S. Baddeley (Paris: 2003). Paradin, Guillaume. Chronique de Savoye (Lyon: 1561). Paré, Ambroise. Les Œuvres d’Ambroise Paré, conseiller et premier chirurgien du Roy (Paris: 1585). Pasquier, Estienne. Lettres familières, ed. D. Thickett (Geneva: 1974). Philippe, Gaspard. La Pragmatique Sanction et le traicte de Guillermus paraldi nouvellement imprime a Paris par Gaspard Philippe (Paris: 1508). Poliziano, Angelo. Angeli Politiani Opera. Quorum Primus hic tomus complectitur Epistolarum libros xii. Miscellaneorum Centuriam i. Omnia jam recens à mendis repurgata (Lyon: 1533). Pulci, Luigi. Morgante, ed. F. Ageno, 2 vols. (1955, repr. Milan: 1994). Pulci, Luigi. Morgante: The Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante, trans. J. Tusiani (Bloomington: 1998). Puy-Herbault, Gabriel du. Theotimus, sive de tollendis et expungendis malis libris (Paris: 1549). Recueil de farces (1450–1550), ed. A. Tissier, vol. 4 (Geneva: 1989). Recueil de farces (1450–1550), ed. A. Tissier, vol. 11 (Geneva: 1997). Recueil de farces françaises inédites du xve siècle, ed. G. Cohen (Cambridge, MA: 1949).

578

bibliography

Recueil des sotties françaises, eds. M. Bouhaïk-Gironès, J. Koopmans, and K. Lavéant, vol. i (Paris: 2014). Recueil général des moralités françaises, eds. J. Beck and E. Doudet, vol. 13 (Paris: forthcoming). Richelet, Pierre. Dictionnaire françois (Paris: 1680). Ruby, Pechon de. La Vie genereuse des Mercelots, Gueuz et Boesmiens, contenans leur façon de vivre, subtilitez & Gergon [1596], ed. D. Delaplace (Paris: 2007). Sébillet, Thomas. Art poetique françoys [1548] (Paris: 1555). Sébillet, Thomas. “Art poétique français,” in Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance, ed. F. Goyet (Paris: 1990). Sotise à huit personnaiges, ed. O.A. Duhl (Geneva: 2005). Spirito, Lorenzo. Le Livre de passé temps de la fortune des dez Ingenieusement compile par maistre Laurens lesperit pour responses de vingt questions par plusieurs coustumeement faictes & desirees savoir qui sont specifies aut retour de ce feuillet en la roue de fortune … (Lyon: 1532) (Houghton Library Typ 515.32.804). Swift, Jonathan. Œuvres, ed. E. Pons (Paris: 1965). Thevet, André. Cosmographie de Levant (1556), ed. F. Lestringant (Geneva: 1985). Tiraqueau, André. Andreæ Tiraquelli […] ex commentariis in Pictonum consuetudines Sectio. De legibus connubialius et jure maritali (Paris: 1524). Tory, Geoffroy. Champfleury (Paris: 1529). Trento, Jean-Baptiste and Pierre Eskrich. Histoire de la Mappe-Monde Nouvelle Papistique, ed. F. Lestringant and A. Preda (Geneva: 2009). Turpin. Cronique et histoire faicte et composée par reverend pere en dieu Turpin archeveque de Reims […] contenant les prouesses et faictz d’armes advenuz en son temps du très magnanime Roy Charles le grand, autrement dit Charlemagne et de son neveu Roland (Paris: 1527).

Secondary Texts The two major series dedicated to Rabelais, Études rabelaisiennes (59 volumes as of 2021) and L’Année rabelaisienne (one volume per year since 2017) are the two main sources for any student of Rabelais’s writings. Allen, Valerie. On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (London: 2010). Amalfi, Gaetano. “La prima versione italiana dal Rabelais,” in Gaetano Amalfi, Grandi e Piccoli: Critica letteraria (Naples: 1900), 179–190. Angeli, Giovanna. “Comique et cruauté à la fin du moyen âge: Panurge et Villon,” Le Moyen Français 44–45 (2000): 9–20. Angenot, Marc. La parole polémique: Typologie des discours modernes (Paris: 1982).

bibliography

579

Angenot, Marc. Les champions des femmes: Examen du discours sur la supériorité des femmes. 1400–1800 (Montreal: 1977). Antonioli, Roland. Rabelais et la médecine (Geneva: 1976). Ard Boone, Rebecca. War, Domination, and the Monarchy of France: Claude de Seyssel and the Language of Politics in the Renaissance (Leiden: 2007). Aronson, Nicole. Les idées politiques de Rabelais (Paris: 1973). Arsenault, Christine. Les singes de Rabelais: La transfictionnalité et postérité littéraire de l’œuvre rabelaisienne (1532–1619), PhD thesis (Rimouski-Paris: 2015). Artal, Susana G. “Rabelais en España: Notas para la crónica de un desencuentro,” Signos (Valparaiso) 28.37 (1995): 11–17. Arveiller, Raymond. “La Briefve Declaration est-elle de Rabelais?,” er 5 (1964): 9–10. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W.R. Trask (Princeton: 1953, 1968); French trans. Mimesis: La représentation de la réalité dans la littérature occidentale, trans. C. Heim (Paris: 1968). Bakhtin, Mikhail. Dialogic Imagination, trans. M. Holquist (Austin, TX: 1981). Bakhtin, Mikhail. Esthétique et théorie du roman, trans. D. Olivier (Paris: 1978). Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: 1968, 1985); French trans. L’œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, trans. A. Robel (Paris: 1970). Baldinger, Kurt. Etymologisches Wörterbuch zu Rabelais (Gargantua) (Tübingen: 2001). Baldinger, Kurt. Études autour de Rabelais, (er) 23 (Geneva: 1990). Baraz, Michael. “Rabelais et l’utopie,” er 15 (1980): 1–30. Barbe, Jean-Paul. “Christian Lävin Sander adaptateur de Rabelais: Libertés d’un traducteur à la fin du xviiie siècle,” in Mélanges offerts à Jacques Grange à l’occasion de son départ à la retraite, eds. J.-P. Barbe and G. Volz (Nantes: 1989), 17–26. Barthes, Roland. Le degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: 1953, 1972). Bastiaensen, Michael. “L’hébreu chez Rabelais,”Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 46 (1968): 725–748. Baudry, Hervé. “Rabelais et le Portugal,” in Rabelais pour le xxie siècle. Actes du colloque du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Chinon-Tours, 1994, ed. M. Simonin, (er) 33 (Geneva: 1998), 389–403. Bauschatz, Cathleen M. “Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre on Sixteenth-Century Views of Clandestine Marriage,” scj 34.2 (2003): 395–408. Bayle, Ariane. Romans à l’encan: De l’art du boniment dans la littérature au xvie siècle (Geneva: 2009). Bayless, Martha. Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine (London: 2011). Bazola, Jean. “La femme dans la vie et l’œuvre de Rabelais,” Bulletin de l’Association des amis de Rabelais et de La Devinière 6.6 (2007): 561–572; 6.7 (2008): 648–657. Beaujour, Michel. Le jeu de Rabelais (Paris: 1969).

580

bibliography

Benaïm-Ouaknine, Esther. “Pouvoir libérateur du vin et ivresse du texte,” Médiévales 22–23 (1992): 163–172. Bermann, Antoine. La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain (Paris: 1999). Berriot-Salvadore, Evelyne. Les femmes dans la société française de la Renaissance (Geneva: 1990). Berrong, Richard M. Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel (Lincoln, NE: 1986). Berrong, Richard M. “Jean Lemaire de Belges, Dictys of Crete, and Giovanni Boccaccio: possible sources for Gargantua, Ch. 1,” er 17 (1983): 89–92. Berry, Alice Fiola. The Charm of Catastrophe: A Study of Rabelais’s Quart Livre (Chapel Hill: 2000). Berry, Alice Fiola. Rabelais: Homo logos (Chapel Hill: 1979). Berry, Alice Fiola. “L’invisibilité du visible. La lettre de la dame parisienne,” in Sans autre guide. Mélanges offerts à Marcel Tetel, eds. P. Desan et al. (Paris: 1999), 25–32. Berry, Alice Fiola. “ ‘Written in the Mind With an Iron Pen’: The Failure of Misogynistic Cliché in the Rondibilis Episode of Rabelais’s Tiers livre (31–34),” French Studies 49.3 (1995): 275–282. Bertalot, Enrico U. “Rabelais et la Bible d’après les quatre premiers livres,” er 5 (1964): 19–40. Besch, Emile. “Les adaptations en prose des chansons de geste,” rss 3 (1915): 155–181. Besson, Paul. Étude sur Jean Fischart (Paris: 1889). Bichon, Jean. “Rabelais et la vie oeconomique,” er 7 (1967): 105–117. Blanchard, W. Scott. Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg: 1995). Boiteux, Martine. “Les Juifs dans le Carnaval de la Rome moderne, xvie–xviiie siècles,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome. Moyen-Age, Temps modernes 88.2 (1976): 745– 787. Bolgar, Robert R. “Rabelais’s edition of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates,” The Modern Language Review 35.1 (January 1940): 62–66. Bonfil, Roberto. Rabbini e comunità ebraiche nell’italia del rinascimento (Naples: 2012). Booth, Wayne. “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 9.1 (1982): 45–76. Bordier, Jean-Pierre. Le jeu de la Passion: Le message chrétien et le théâtre français (xiiie– xvie s.) (Paris: 1998). Bouchard, Mawy. Avant le roman: L’allégorie et l’émergence de la narration française au 16e siècle (Amsterdam-New York: 2006). Boulenger, Jacques. Rabelais à travers les âges (Paris: 1925). Boulet, Marguerite. “Les élections épiscopales en France au lendemain du Concordat de Bologne (1516–1531),” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 57 (1940): 190–234. Bourke, John G. Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (Washington, D.C.: 1891).

bibliography

581

Bourrilly, Victor-Louis. Guillaume du Bellay, seigneur de Langey, 1491–1543 (Paris: 1904). Bowen, Barbara C. Enter Rabelais, Laughing (Nashville-London: 1998). Bowen, Barbara C. (ed.). Rabelais in Context. Proceedings of the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference (Birmingham, AL: 1993). Bowen, Barbara C. The Age of Bluff: Paradox and Ambiguity in Rabelais and Montaigne (Urbana: 1972). Bowen, Barbara C. “Women in Rabelais’s Chroniques,” Cornucopia. Le Verger i (2012). http://cornucopia16.com/wp‑content/uploads/2014/07/Verger1_BOWEN.pdf. Bowen, Barbara C. “Rabelais’s Panurge as homo rhetoricus,” in In Laudem Caroli: Renaissance and Reformation Studies for Charles G. Nauert, ed. J.V. Mehl (Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies) 49 (Kirksville: 1998), 125–133. Bowen, Barbara C. “Janotus de Bragmardo in the Limelight (Gargantua, ch. 19),” The French Review 72 (1998): 229–237. Bowen, Barbara C. “Rabelais and Folengo Once Again,” in Rabelais in Context. Proceedings of the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference, ed. B.C. Bowen (Birmingham, AL: 1993), 133–146. Bowen, Barbara C. “Rabelais et le propos torcheculatif,” in Poétique et narration: Mélanges offerts à Guy Demerson, eds. F. Marotin and J.-P. Saint-Gérand (Paris: 1993), 371–380. Bowen, Barbara C. “Rabelais and the Library of Saint-Victor,” in Lapidary Inscriptions: Renaissance Studies for D. A. Stone, ed. B.C. Bowen and J.C. Nash (Lexington, KY: 1991), 159–170. Bowen, Barbara C. “Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages,”L’esprit créateur 21 (1981): 12–25. Boyarin, Daniel. Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: 2009). Brancher, Dominique. “Un monstre de langage: L’anatomie de Quaresmeprenant,” Versants 56.1 (2009): 115–137. Brault, Gérard J. “Ung abysme de science: On the Interpretation of Gargantua’s Letter to Pantagruel,” bhr 28 (1966): 615–632. Briand, Michel, Sandrine Dubel, and Ariane Eissen (eds.). Rire et dialogue (La Licorne) 126 (Rennes: 2017). Briggs, Robin. “Dangerous Spirits: Shape-shifting, Apparitions, and Fantasy in Lorraine Witchcraft Trials,” in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. K.A. Edwards (Kirksville: 2002), 1–24. Bromilow, Pollie E. “Inside Out. Female Bodies in Rabelais,”Forum for Modern Language Studies 44.1 (2008): 27–39. Brown, Huntington. Rabelais in English Literature (Cambridge, MA: 1933; repr. New York: 1967). Brummack, Jürgen. “Zu Begriff und Theorie der Satire,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 45 (1971): 277–375. Brunet, Gustave. Essais d’études bibliographiques sur Rabelais (Paris: 1841).

582

bibliography

Bulang, Tobias (ed.). Johann Fischart genannt Mentzer. Frühneuzeitliche Autorschaft im intermedialen Kontext (Wiesbaden: 2019). Bulang, Tobias. “Possible Discourses and the Unfolding of the Implicit. Some Remarks on Fischart’s Catalogus Catalogorum,” in Early Modern Catalogues of Imaginary Books. A Scholarly Anthology, eds. A.-P. Pouey-Mounou and P. J. Smith (LeidenBoston: 2019), 160–189. Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: 1978; repr. Farnham: 2009). Butor, Michel and Denis Hollier (eds.). Rabelais ou c’était pour rire (Paris: 1972). Butterworth, Emily. “Scandal in Rabelais’s Tiers Livre: Divination, Interpretation, and Edification,” R&R 34.4 (2011): 23–43. Cabantous, Alain. Histoire du blasphème en Occident: fin xvie–milieu xixe siècle (Paris: 1998). Campbell, Catherine E. A History of Ballet, Opera, Theater, and Stories Inspired by François Rabelais: The Fountain of French Music, Art, and Literature (Lewiston, NY: 2008). Campbell, Katia. “Du vrai et faux hébreu chez François Rabelais,” in L’Hébreu au temps de la Renaissance, ed. I. Zinguer (Leiden: 1992), 197–210. Capodivacca, Angela Matilde. “The Witch as Muse: Macaronic Fantasy and Skepticism in Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus,” in Folengo in America, ed. M. Scalabrino (Ravenna: 2012), 121–152. Cappellen, Raphaël. “Feueilleter papiers, quotter cayers”: La citation au regard de l’erudito ludere des fictions rabelaisiennes, PhD thesis (University of Tours: 2013). Cappellen, Raphaël and Paul J. Smith, “Entre l’auteur et l’éditeur: La forme-liste chez Rabelais,” ar 1 (2016): 121–144. Cappellen, Raphaël. “Rabelais lecteur des Epigrammatum graecorum libri vii commentés par Jean Brodeau (1549),” in Les Labyrinthes de l’esprit, eds. R. Gorris-Camos and A. Vanautgaerden (Geneva: 2015), 105–119. Carron, Jean-Claude (ed.). François Rabelais: Critical Assessments (Baltimore: 1995). Cave, Terence. Pré-Histoires ii: Langues étrangères et troubles économiques au xvie siècle (Geneva: 2001). Cave, Terence. Pré-Histoires: Textes troublés au seuil de la modernité (Geneva: 1999). Cave, Terence. The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: 1979). Cave, Terence. “Panurge, Pathelin and other Polyglots,” in Lapidary Inscriptions, eds. B.C. Bowen and J.C. Nash (Lexington, KY: 1991), 171–182. Cave, Terence. “Transformations d’un topos utopique: Gaster et le rocher de vertu,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 319–325. Cave, Terence. “Reading Rabelais: Variations on the Rock of Virtue,” Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts, eds. P. Parker and D. Quint (Baltimore: 1986), 78–95.

bibliography

583

Cave, Terence. “Panurge and Odysseus,” in Myth and Legend in French Literature: Essays in Honour of A. J. Steele, eds. K. Aspley, D. Bellos, and P. Sharratt (London: 1982), 47– 59. Céard, Jean and Jean-Claude Margolin (eds.). Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988). Céard, Jean and Jean-Claude Margolin. Rébus de la Renaissance: Des images qui parlent, 2 vol. (Paris: 1986). Céard, Jean. La Nature et les prodiges: L’insolite au xvie siècle en France (Geneva: 1977). Céard, Jean. “Bibliographie sur Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre,” Vox poetica (2007). http://www​ .vox‑poetica.com/sflgc/concours/rablaisbiblio.html. Céard, Jean. “L’érudition dans le Cinquiesme Livre,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 41–53. Céard, Jean. “Le Tiers Livre édité par Mireille Huchon,” in Le Tiers Livre. Actes du Colloque international de Rome, mars 1996, ed. F. Giacone (er) 37 (Geneva: 1999), 104– 114. Céard, Jean. “Le Jugement de Bridoye,” Cahiers Textuel 15 (1996): 49–62. Céard, Jean. “Rabelais, lecteur et juge des romans de chevalerie,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 237–248. Céard, Jean. “Rabelais et la matière épique,” in La Chanson de geste et le mythe carolingien. Mélanges René Louis (Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay: 1982), 1259–1276. Céard, Jean. “De Babel à la Pentecôte: La transformation du mythe de la confusion des langues au xvie siècle,” bhr 42–43 (1980): 577–594. Céard, Jean. “L’Histoire écoutée aux portes de la légende: Rabelais, les fables de Turpin et les exemples de saint Nicolas,” in Études seiziémistes offertes à Monsieur le Professeur V.L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1980), 91–109. Céard, Jean. “La Querelle des géants et la jeunesse du monde,” jmrs 8 (1978): 37–76. Chambon, Jean-Pierre. “Andrieu de La Vigne, source de Rabelais?,” er 29 (1993): 57–61. Charles, Michel. Rhétorique de la lecture (Paris: 1977). Charpentier, Françoise. “Une éducation de Prince: Gargantua, chapitre xi,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 103–108. Charpentier, Françoise. “Un Royaume qui perdure sans femmes,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 195–209. Charpentier, Françoise. “La guerre des Andouilles. Pantagruel iv, 35–42,” in Études seiziémistes offertes à Monsieur le Professeur V.L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1980), 119–135. Chastel, André. Le Sac de Rome—1527 (Paris: 1984). Chesney, Elizabeth A. The Countervoyage of Rabelais and Ariosto: A Comparative Reading of Two Renaissance Mock Epics (Durham: 1982).

584

bibliography

Chevallier, Raymond. “Rabelais lecteur de Virgile,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 79.1 (2001): 119–126. Chomarat, Jacques. Grammaire et rhétorique chez Érasme (Paris: 1981). Church, William Farr. Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France: A Study in the Evolution of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: 1941). Cifarelli, Paola. “Le Quart Livre et ses traductions italiennes,” in Langue et sens du Quart livre, ed. F. Giacone (Paris: 2012), 13–25. Clark, Carol. The Vulgar Rabelais (Glasgow: 1983). Clavel, Christophe. “Dithirambes pour un massacre: Création lexicale et esthétique des genres,” er 44 (2006): 13–30. Clément, Michèle. Le Cynisme à la Renaissance: D’Érasme à Montaigne (Geneva: 2005). Clément, Michèle and Pascale Mounier (eds.). Le Roman français au xvie siècle ou le renouveau d’un genre dans le contexte européen (Strasbourg: 2005). Clément, Michèle. “Rabelais et ses privileges. Un autre accès à la pratique auctoriale?” in Inextinguible Rabelais, eds. M. Huchon, N. Le Cadet, R. Menini (Paris: 2021), 95– 117. Clément, Michèle. “Le jargon des gueux chez Rabelais,” in La langue de Rabelais et la langue de Montaigne. Actes du colloque de Rome, septembre 2003, eds. J. Céard and F. Giacone (er) 48 (Geneva: 2008), 155–173. Clouzot, Henri. “Ballets tirés de Rabelais au xviie siècle,” rer 5 (1907): 90–97. Cohen, Gustave. “Rabelais et le théâtre,” rer 9 (1911): 1–72. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Medieval Cultures) 17 (Minneapolis: 1999). Coleman, Dorothy. Rabelais: A Critical Study in Prose Fiction (London-New York: 1971). Coleman, James A. and Christine M. Scollen-Jimack (eds.). Rabelais in Glasgow (Glasgow: 1984). Coleman, Paul. “‘The Taylor’s Stitch’: Sir Thomas Urquhart’s Translation of Rabelais,” The Cambridge Quarterly 32.4 (2003): 299–309. Colie, Rosalie. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: 1966). Colnort-Bodet, Suzanne. Le code alchimique dévoilé (Paris: 1989). Conley, Tom. À fleur de page: Voir et lire le texte de la Renaissance (Paris: 2015). Conley, Tom. Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: 2011). Conley, Tom. The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: 1996, 2010). Conley, Tom. The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (Cambridge: 1992). Cooper, Richard. Litteræ in tempore belli: Études sur les relations littéraires italofrançaises pendant les guerres d’Italie (Geneva: 1997). Cooper, Richard. Rabelais et l’Italie, (er) 24 (Geneva: 1991).

bibliography

585

Cooper, Richard. “Rabelais et la parodie littéraire,” ar 1 (2017): 101–119. Cooper, Richard. “Reading and unraveling Rabelais through the ages,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais, ed. J. O’Brien (Cambridge, Eng.: 2011), 141–156. Cooper, Richard. “L’authenticité du Cinquiesme Livre: état présent de la question,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 9–22. Cooper, Richard. “Rabelais, Jean Du Bellay et la crise gallicane,” in Rabelais pour le xxie siècle. Actes du colloque du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, ChinonTours, 1994, ed. M. Simonin (er) 33 (Geneva: 1998), 299–325. Cooper, Richard. “Le véritable Rabelais déformé,” in Éditer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges, ed. P.J. Smith (Amsterdam-Atlanta: 1997), 195–220. Cooper, Richard. “‘Charmant mais très obscène’: Some French Eighteenth Century Readings of Rabelais,” in Enlightenment. Essays in memory of Robert Shackleton, eds. G. Barber and C.P. Courtney, (Oxford: 1988), 39–60. Cooper, Richard. “Rabelais et l’Eglise,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 111–120. Cooper, Richard. “Rabelais et l’Italie: Les lettres écrites de Rome,” caief 30 (May 1978): 23–39. Cordellier, Dominique. “Sept dessins de ‘drôlerie’,” Grande Galerie. Le journal du Louvre 16 (2011): 8–9. Cornilliat, François. “On sound effects in Rabelais (part ii),” er 42 (2003): 7–55. Cornilliat, François. “On sound effects in Rabelais (part i),” er 39 (2000): 137–167. Cornilliat, François. “On Words and Meaning in Rabelais Criticism,” er 35 (1998): 7– 28. Courouau, Jean-François. Et non autrement: Marginalisation et résistance des langues de France (xvie–xviie siècle) (Geneva: 2012). Courouau, Jean-François. Moun lengatge bèl: Les choix linguistiques minoritaires en France, 1490–1660 (Geneva: 2008). Craik, Roger J. Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, 1611–1660, Adventurer, Polymath, and Translator of Rabelais (Lewiston: 1993). Craik, Roger J. “The Pioneer Translators of Rabelais: Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Motteux,” Translation Review 51–52 (1996): 31–42. Craik, Roger J. “The Triumph of Exuberance over Inhibition: Sir Thomas Urquhart’s Translation of Rabelais,” Lamar Journal of the Humanities 22.1 (1996): 41–64. Crescenzo, Richard. “Les controverses interprétatives de Pantagruel et Panurge dans le Tiers Livre: Étude des stratégies rhétoriques et argumentatives,” in Rabelais: À propos du Tiers Livre, eds. J. Dauphiné and P. Mironneau (Biarritz: 1995), 31–43. Cross, Frank L. and Elizabeth A. Livingstone (eds.). The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: 2005).

586

bibliography

Crouzet, Denis. Les guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525–vers 1610 (Seyssel: 1990). D’Aigrefeuille, Charles. Histoire de la ville de Montpellier (Montpellier: 1737). Dauvois, Nathalie and Jean Vignes (eds.). En relisant le Quart Livre de Rabelais. Cahiers Textuel 35 (2012). Davidson, Israel. Parody in Jewish Literature (1907; repr. New York: 1966). Davis, Natalie Zemon. Les cultures du peuple: Rituels, savoirs, résistances (Paris: 1979). Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Rabelais among the Censors,” Representations 32 (1990): 1–32. De Bruaene, Anne-Laure. Om Beters Wille. Rederijkerskamers en de stedelijke cultuur in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden (1400–1650) (Amsterdam: 2008). De Grève, Claude and Jean Céard (eds.). La réception de Rabelais en Europe du xvie au xviiie siècle (Paris: 2009). De Grève, Marcel. L’interprétation de Rabelais au xvie siècle, (er) 3 (Geneva: 1961). De Grève, Marcel. “La légende de Gargantua en Angleterre au xvie siècle,” in La réception de Rabelais en Europe du xvie au xviiie siècle, eds. C. De Grève and J. Céard (Paris: 2009), 109–275. De Grève, Marcel. “Les érudits du xviie siècle en quête de la clef de Rabelais,” er 5 (1964): 41–63. De Grève, Marcel. “Limites de l’influence linguistique de Rabelais en Angleterre au 16e siècle,” Comparative Literature Studies 1.1 (1964): 15–30. De Grève, Marcel. “Rabelais au pays de Brueghel: Réflexions sur la popularité de Rabelais dans les Pays-Bas du xvie siècle,” in bhr 17 (1955): 154–187. De Smet, Ingrid A.R. Menippean Satire and the Republic of Letters (1581–1655) (Geneva: 1996). De Smet, Rudolf (ed.). La satire humaniste. Actes du Colloque international des 31 mars, 1er et 2 avril 1993 (Brussels: 1994). Debaggi Baranova, Tatiana. À coup de libelles: Une culture politique au temps des guerres de religion (1562–1598) (Geneva: 2012). Debailly, Pascal. La Muse indignée: La satire en France au seizième siècle (Paris: 2012). Debailly, Pascal. “Le rire satirique,” bhr 56 (1994): 695–717. Defaux, Gérard. Rabelais agonistes: Du rieur au prophète. Etudes sur Pantagruel, Gargantua et Le Quart Livre, (er) 32 (Geneva: 1997). Defaux, Gérard. Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne: L’écriture comme présence (Paris: 1987). Defaux, Gérard. Le Curieux, le Glorieux et la sagesse du monde: L’exemple de Panurge (Ulysse, Démosthène, Empédocle) (Lexington, KY: 1982). Defaux, Gérard. Pantagruel et les sophistes: Contribution à l’histoire de l’humanisme chrétien au xvie siècle (The Hague: 1973). Defaux, Gérard. “Rabelais’s Realism, Again,” er 29 (1993): 25–41. Defaux, Gérard. “D’un problème l’autre: Herméneutique de l’ altior sensus et captatio lectoris dans le Prologue de Gargantua,” rhlf 85 (1985): 195–216.

bibliography

587

Defaux, Gérard. “Une rencontre homérique: Panurge noble, pérégrin et curieux,”ff 6.2 (May 1981): 109–122. Defaux, Gérard. “De Pantagruel au Tiers Livre: Panurge et le pouvoir,” er 13 (1976): 163– 180. Defaux, Gérard. “Rabelais et son masque comique: Sophista loquitur,” er 11 (1974): 89– 135. Defaux, Gérard. “Rabelais et les cloches de Notre-Dame,” er 9 (1971): 1–28. Deloince-Louette, Christiane. “Frère Jean des Entommeures: Chasseur et cynique,” rhlf 101 (2001): 3–20. Delumeau, Jean. Le péché et la peur: La culpabilisation en Occident xiiie–xviiie siècles (Paris: 1983). Demerson, Guy and Myriam Marrache-Gouraud (eds.). François Rabelais (Bibliographie des écrivains français) 32 (Rome-Paris: 2010). Demerson, Guy. L’esthétique de Rabelais (Paris: 1996). Demerson, Guy. Humanisme et facétie: Quinze études sur Rabelais (Orléans: 1994). Demerson, Guy. François Rabelais (Paris: 1991). Demerson, Guy. “Apollonios de Tyane chez Rabelais: Christ dans un miroir déformant?,” in Cité des hommes, Cité des dieux. Travaux sur la littérature de la Renaissance en l’honneur de Daniel Ménager, eds. J. Céard, M.-Cristine Gomez-Géraud, and M. Magnien (Geneva: 2003), 503–512. Demerson, Guy. “Trinch ou les hiéroglyphes de la boisson,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 127–146. Demerson, Guy. “Paradigmes épiques chez Rabelais,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 225–236. Demonet, Marie-Luce and Stéphan Geonget (eds.). Un joyeux quart de sentences (er) 52 (Geneva: 2012). Demonet, Marie-Luce. Les voix du signe: Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris: 1992). Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Langue et culture judéo-provençales chez Rabelais: Pourim et shuadit,” online, Academia.edu (12/12/2017), 1–18. Demonet, Marie-Luce “Languegoth et français mêlé chez Rabelais,” in Langues hybrides: expérimentations linguistiques et littéraires (xve-début xviie siècle). Hybridsprachen: Linguistische und literarische Untersuchungen (15.-Anfang 17. Jh), eds. A.P. Pouey-Mounou and Paul J. Smith (Geneva: 2019), 331–349. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Le Théâtre de la synagogue dans l’œuvre de Rabelais,” in Théâtre et révélation. Donner à voir et à entendre au Moyen Âge. Hommage à Jean-Pierre Bordier, ed. S. Le Briz-Orgeur (Paris: 2017), 401–416. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Style rustique et ‘figulines’ littéraires: Rabelais, Palissy, Montaigne,” online (halshs‑01305913 12/09/2017), 1–13.

588

bibliography

Demonet, Marie-Luce. “La langue des troubadours comme origine de la langue française (Rabelais, Fauchet, Blaise de Vigenère),” in La réception des troubadours en Languedoc et en France, xvie–xviiie siècle, eds. J.-F. Courouau and I. Luciani (Paris: 2015), 23–36. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Les drôleries du Quart Livre,” in Langue et sens du Quart Livre, ed. F. Giacone (Paris: 2013), 129–150. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Utopies et dystopies chez Rabelais, de Pantagruel au Quart Livre,” Revista Morus 8 (2013): 14–27. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Rabelais, marin d’eau douce?,” in Un joyeux quart de sentences, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget (er) 52 (Geneva: 2012), 69–88. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Le sens littéral dans l’œuvre de Rabelais,” in Rabelais et la question du sens. Actes du colloque international de Cerisy, août 2000, eds. J. Céard, M.L. Demonet, and S. Geonget (er) 49 (Geneva: 2011), 211–236. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Pantagrueline Humanism and Rabelaisian Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais, ed. J. O’Brien (Cambridge, Eng.: 2011), 73–92. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Raves, Rabbis et Raboulière: La persécution des Papefigues (Rabelais, Quart Livre, chapitre xlv),” in Questions de littérature: Béroul, Rabelais, La Fontaine, Saint-Simon, Maupassant, Lagarce, ed. J.-M. Gouvard (Bordeaux: 2011), 33–59. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Les climats linguistiques,” in Langues et identités culturelles en Europe, xvie–xviie siècles, vol. 1, eds. M.-S. Ortola et M. Roig Miranda (Nancy: 2005), 3–24. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Les êtres de raison, ou les modes d’être de la littérature,” in Res et Verba in der Renaissance, eds. E. Kessler and I. MacLean (Wiesbaden: 2002), 177– 195. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “L’essence du Quint Livre,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 227–241. Demonet Marie-Luce. “Rabelais métalinguiste,” in Le Tiers Livre. Actes du Colloque international de Rome, mars 1996, ed. F. Giacone (er) 37 (Geneva: 1999), 115–128. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Polysémie et pharmacie dans le Tiers Livre,” in Rabelais et le Tiers Livre, ed. E. Kotler (Nice: 1996), 61–84. Demonet, Marie-Luce. “Le nom de Bacbuc,” rhr 34 (1992): 41–66. Denoix, Léon. “Les connaissances nautiques de Rabelais,” in François Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort, 1553–1953 (Geneva: 1953), 171–180. Dentzer, Yvelise. “Jean Neyron, créateur du premier théâtre permanent de Lyon,” Revue d’histoire du théâtre 202 (1999): 101–112. Derrett, J. Duncan M. “Rabelais’ Legal Learning and the Trial of Bridoye,”bhr 25 (1963): 111–171. Desrosiers-Bonin, Diane. Rabelais et l’humanisme civil, (er) 27 (Geneva: 1992).

bibliography

589

Desrosiers, Diane. “Le Tiers Livre de Rabelais et la tradition des progymnasmata,” in Inextinguible Rabelais, eds. M. Huchon, N. Le Cadet, R. Menini (Paris: 2021), 305– 315. Desrosiers, Diane. “Les Chroniques gargantuines et la parodie du chevaleresque,”Etudes françaises 32.1 (1996): 85–95. Desrosiers-Bonin, Diane. “Rabelais et la nature féminine,” in Actes des conférences du Cycle “Rabelais et la nature” organisé durant l’année 1994, ed. F. Metivier, (er) 31 (Geneva: 1996), 31–47. Desrosiers-Bonin, Diane. “Macrobe et les âmes héroïques (Rabelais, Quart livre, chapitres 25 à 28),” R&R 11.3 (1987): 211–221. Dewitte, Alfons. “Eduard de Dene, de Brugse Rabelais?,” Haec Olim 21 (1971): 53–77. Dickow, Alexander. “‘Remède contre fascherie?’ Critique de l’ apatheia dans le Tiers livre de Rabelais,” er 46 (2008): 77–99. Dinzelbacher, Peter. “Lycanthropy,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. R. Golden (Santa Barbara: 2006). Dixon, Jack E.G. and John L. Dawson (eds.). Concordance des œuvres de François Rabelais, (er) 26 (Geneva: 1992). Doiron, Normand. “Les rituels de la tempête en mer: Histoire et voyage au seuil de l’âge classique,” Revue des sciences humaines 214.2 (1989): 44–70. Domínguez, Antonio. “Rabelais y España,” Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica 6.1–2 (1980): 83–102. Donaldson-Evans, Lance K. “Panurge Perplexus: Ambiguity and Relativity in the Tiers Livre,” er 15 (1980): 77–96. Dubois, Claude-Gilbert. Celtes et Gaulois au xvie siècle: Le développement d’un mythe nationaliste (Paris: 1977). Dubois, Claude-Gilbert. Mythe et langage au xvie siècle (Bordeaux: 1970). Dubois, Claude-Gilbert. “‘La chanson de Ricochet’: Fonction de la réitération dans le Tiers Livre de Rabelais,” Cahiers Textuel 15 (1996): 19–32. Duhl, Olga Anna. Folie et rhétorique dans la sottie (Geneva: 1994). Dumas, Geneviève. Santé et société: Montpellier à la fin du Moyen Âge (Leiden-Boston: 2015). Dupèbe, Jean. “Rabelais, médecin astrologue du Pantagruel au Tiers Livre,” in Le Tiers Livre. Actes du Colloque international de Rome, mars 1996, ed. F. Giacone, (er) 37 (Geneva: 1999), 71–97. Dupèbe, Jean. “Un chancelier humaniste sous François ier, François Olivier,” in Humanism and Letters in the Age of François ier, eds. P. Ford and G. Jondorf (Cambridge, Eng.: 1996), 87–114. Duport, Danièle. Le jardin et la nature: Ordre et variété dans la littérature de la Renaissance (Geneva: 2002). Duport, Danièle. Ronsard et la poétique du paysage (Geneva: 2000).

590

bibliography

Duval, Edwin M. The Design of Rabelais’s Quart Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 36 (Geneva: 1998). Duval, Edwin M. The Design of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, (er) 34 (Geneva: 1997). Duval, Edwin M. The Design of Rabelais’s Pantagruel (New Haven: 1991). Duval, Edwin M. “En quoi les œuvres de Rabelais sont-elles hybrides?,” in Rabelais et l’hybridité des récits rabelaisiens, eds. D. Desrosiers-Bonin, C. La Charité, C. Veilleux, and T. Vigliano, (er) 56 (Geneva: 2017), 25–43. Duval, Edwin M. “Putting religion in its place,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais, ed. J. O’Brien (Cambridge, Eng.: 2010), 93–106. Duval, Edwin M. “Rabelais and French Renaissance Satire,” in A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern, ed. R. Quintero (Malden: 2007), 70–85. Duval, Edwin M. “Pantagruel’s ‘chanson de ricochet’ and Rabelais’s ‘art et manière d’escrire histoires’,” in Rabelais in Context. Proceedings of the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference, ed. B.C. Bowen (Birmingham, AL: 1993), 21–38. Duval, Edwin M. “La messe, la cène, et le voyage sans fin du Quart Livre,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 131–141. Duval, Edwin M. “The Medieval Curriculum,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 30–44. Duval, Edwin M. “Interpretation and the ‘Doctrine absconse’ of Rabelais’s Prologue to Gargantua,” er 18 (1985): 1–17. Duval, Edwin M. “The Judge Bridoye, Pantagruelism, and the Unity of Rabelais’ Tiers Livre,” er 17 (1983): 37–60. Duval, Sophie and Marc Martinez. La Satire (littératures française et anglaise) (Paris: 2000). Eichel-Lojkine, Patricia (ed.). Claude de Seyssel, c. 1450–1520: Écrire l’histoire, penser la politique en France, à l’aube des temps modernes (Rennes: 2010). Eichel-Lojkine, Patricia. Excentricité et humanisme: Parodie, dérision et détournement des codes à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2002). Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process (Oxford: 1969). Elliott, Robert. The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton: 1960). Elwood, Christopher. The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: 1999). Enders, Jody. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: 2002). Erickson-Bouzrara, Nancy and Catherine Masson (eds.). Théâtre de femmes de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: 2007). Faber, Frédéric. Histoire du théâtre français en Belgique (Brussels: 1888). Febvre, Lucien. Le problème de l’incroyance au xvie siècle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris: 1942; reed. 2003).

bibliography

591

Flaubert, Gustave. Étude sur Rabelais (Rouen: 1839), in Œuvres de jeunesse, ed. C. Gothot-Mersch and G. Sagnes (Paris: 2001). Fontaine, Marie Madeleine. “Quaresmeprenant: l’image littéraire et la contestation de l’analogie médicale,” in Rabelais in Glasgow, eds. J.A. Coleman and C.M. ScollenJimack (Glasgow: 1984), 87–112. Ford, Philip. De Troie à Ithaque: Réception des épopées homériques à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2007). Foucault, Michel. Le corps utopique. Les hétérotopies, ed. D. Defert (Paris: 2009). Foucault, Michel. Le courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres ii (Paris: 2009). Foucault, Michel. L’histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: 1972). Frame, Donald M. François Rabelais: A Study (New York: 1977). Françon, Marcel. “Note sur le prologue du Tiers Livre et l’invasion de la Champagne en 1544,” er 9 (1971): 129–130. Françon, Marcel. “Note sur le Tiers Livre de Rabelais,” er 8 (1969): 79–83. Franklin, Julian H. Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (New York: 1969). Freccero, Carla. Father Figures: Genealogy and Narrative Structures in Rabelais (Ithaca: 1991). Freccero, Carla. “Queer Rabelais?” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais, eds. T.W. Reeser and F. Gray (New York: 2011), 182–191. Freccero, Carla. “The ‘Instance’ of the Letter: Woman in the Text of Rabelais,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 45–55. Freccero, Carla. “Damning Haughty Dames: Panurge and the ‘Haulte dame de Paris’ (Pantagruel, 14),” jmrs 15 (1985): 57–67. Friedman, John Block. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: 1981). Fruet, Arlette. Les voyageurs d’îles: Sur la route des Indes aux xviie et xviiie siècles (Paris: 2010). Gaignebet, Claude. A plus hault sens: L’ésotérisme spirituel et charnel de Rabelais, 2 vols. (Paris: 1986). Garçon, Anne-Françoise. “Histoire de la notion de progrès. Leçon 3: Les nouveaux régimes du savoir, 1520–1580.” (https://sites.google.com/site/afgarcon/home). Garnier-Mathez, Isabelle. “Langue et intertextualité: La qualification adjectivale, signe de connivence évangélique chez Rabelais,” in La langue de Rabelais et la langue de Montaigne. Actes du colloque de Rome, septembre 2003, eds. J. Céard and F. Giacone, (er) 48 (Geneva: 2008), 93–114. Gauna, Max. The Rabelaisian Mythologies (Madison: 1996). Gauna, Max. “Fruitful Fields and Blessed Spirits, or Why the Thelemites Were Well Born,” er 15 (1980): 117–128.

592

bibliography

Geirnaert, Dirk. “Eduard de Dene and his gift for Hanno,” in Early Modern Catalogues of Imaginary Books, eds. A.-P. Pouey-Mounou and P.J. Smith (Leiden: 2019), 112– 134. Geirnaert, Dirk. “Imitating Rabelais in Sixteenth-Century Flanders: The Case of Eduard de Dene,” in Éditer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges, ed. P.J. Smith (AmsterdamAtlanta: 1997), 66–100. Gendre, André. “Le Prologue de Pantagruel, le Prologue de Gargantua: Examen comparatif,” rhlf 74 (1974): 3–19. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: 1982). Genette, Gérard. Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie (Paris: 1976). Gennep, Arnold van. Le folklore de la Flandre et du Hainaut Français, 2 vols. (Paris: 1935– 1936). Geonget, Stéphan. La notion de perplexité à la Renaissance (Geneva: 2006). Germain, Alexandre. “La Renaissance à Montpellier: Étude historique d’après des documents originaux,” Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Montpellier 6 (1871): 1– 156. Giacone, Franco (ed.). Langue et sens du Quart Livre (Paris: 2012). Giacone, Franco (ed.). Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998 (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001). Giacone, Franco. “Relecture de l’épisode de l’Isle des Papefigues (Quart Livre, xlv– xlvii),” in Langue et sens du Quart Livre, ed. F. Giacone (Paris: 2012), 411–432. Giacone, Franco. “Deux suppliques inédites de Rabelais au pape Paul iii,” in Esculape et Dionysos: Mélanges en l’honneur de Jean Céard, eds. J. Dupèbe, F. Giacone, E. Naya and A.-P. Pouey-Mounou (Geneva: 2008), 683–705. Giacone, Franco. “Una supplica inedita di François Rabelais al papa Paolo iii,” in Les Pas d’Orphée. Scritti in onore di Mario Richter, ed. M.E. Raffi (Padua: 2005), 43–56. Gid, Denise, “Un ex-libris de Rabelais à la Bibliothèque Mazarine,” Revue française d’histoire du livre, 43e année, 4.7 (1974): 141–143. Gille, Bertrand. Les ingénieurs de la Renaissance (Paris: 1964). Gillet, J.E. “Note sur Rabelais en Espagne,” Revue de littérature comparée 16 (1936): 140– 144. Gilman, Peter and Abraham C. Keller. “Rabelais, the ‘Grandes Chroniques’, and Jean Lemaire de Belges,” er 30 (1993): 93–103. Gilson, Etienne. L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale (Paris: 1969). Gilson, Etienne. Les idées et les lettres (Paris: 1932). Gilson, Etienne. Rabelais franciscain (Paris: 1924). Gilson, Etienne. “Rabelais franciscain,” Revue d’histoire franciscaine 3 (1924), repr. in De la Bible à François Villon: Rabelais franciscain (Paris: 1986), 214–215. Ginsburg, Léonard. “Nouvelles lumières sur les ossements autrefois attribués au géant Theutobochus,” Annales de Paléontologie 70.3 (1984): 181–219.

bibliography

593

Ginzburg, Carlo. The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi (1983; repr. New York: 1986). Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi (1980; repr. New York: 1988). Giordani, Françoise. “Les tribulations d’une besace,” in Poétique et narration: Mélanges offerts à Guy Demerson, eds. F. Marotin and J.-P. Saint-Gérand (Paris: 1993), 393–405. Glidden, Hope. “L’épopée décalée de Rabelais,” in Le plaisir de l’épopée, ed. G. MathieuCastellani (Saint-Denis: 2000), 313–330. Glidden, Hope. “Rabelais, Panurge, and the Anti-Courtly Body,” er 25 (1991): 35–60. Glucksmann, André. Les maîtres penseurs (Paris: 1977). Gonthier, Nicole. “Sanglant Coupaul!” “Orde Ribaude!” Les injures au Moyen Âge (Rennes: 2007). Gordon, Richard. F. Rabelais à la faculté de médecine de Montpellier (Montpellier: 1876). Goumarre, Pierre. “Rabelais: Misogynie et misogamie,” Littératures 15 (1986): 59–71. Gouron, Marcel. Matricule de l’Université de médecine de Montpellier (Geneva: 1957). Goyet, Francis. “D’Hercule à Pantagruel: L’ambivalence des géants,” Rabelais pour le xxie siècle. Actes du Colloque du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Chinon-Tours, 1994, ed. M. Simonin (er) 33 (Geneva: 1998), 177–190. Gray, Floyd. Rabelais et le comique du discontinu (Paris: 1994). Gray, Floyd. Rabelais et l’écriture (Paris: 1974). Gray, Floyd. “Structure and Meaning in the Prologue to the Tiers Livre,” L’esprit créateur 3.2 (1963): 57–62. Greenblatt, Stephen. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: 1990). Greene, Thomas. Rabelais: A Study in Comic Courage (New York: 1970). Greene, Thomas. “The Unity of the Tiers Livre,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 293–299. Greub, Yan. Les mots régionaux dans les farces françaises (Strasbourg: 2003). Guerrini, Olindo. “Rabelais in Italia,” Rassegna Settimanale 55 (19 janvier 1879): 52–54. Guillerm, Luce et al. (eds.). Le miroir des femmes, i: Moralistes et polémistes au xvie siècle (Lille: 1983). Guiraud, Pierre. Le Jargon de Villon ou le gai savoir de la Coquille (Paris: 1968). Guiraud, Pierre. L’argot (Paris: 1956). Guynn, Noah D. Pure Filth. Ethics, Politics and Religion in Early French Farce (Philadelphia: 2020). Halévy, Olivier. “Des règles poétiques à la norme linguistique,” crmh 21 (2011): 265– 282. Hallyn, Fernand. Gemma Frisius, arpenteur de la terre et du ciel (Paris: 2008). Hampton, Timothy. Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, London: 1990).

594

bibliography

Hausmann, Frank-Rutger. “Comment doit-on lire l’épisode de ‘l’isle des Papefigues’ (Quart Livre, 45–47)?,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 121–129. Hayes, Bruce. Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais (Farnham: 2010). Hepp, Noémi. “Homère en France au xvie siècle,” Atti della Academia delle Scienze di Torino, ii, Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 90.6 (1961–1962): 389–508. Hess, Günter. Deutsch-lateinische Narrenzunft (Munich: 1971). Heulhard, Arthur. Rabelais, ses voyages en Italie, son exil à Metz (Paris: 1891). Heulhard, Arthur, and Alphonse Lemerre. Rabelais chirurgien: Applications de son Glossocomion dans les fractures du fémur; et de son Syringotome dans le traitement des plaies pénétrantes de l’abdomen décrites par Arthur Heulhard Nivernoys (Paris: 1885). Higman, Francis M. Censorship and the Sorbonne (Geneva: 1979). Hoareau-Dodineau, Jacqueline. Dieu et le Roi: La répression du blasphème et de l’injure au roi à la fin du Moyen Âge (Limoges: 2002). Hodges, Elisabeth. “Rabelais and Feminism,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais, eds. T.W. Reeser and F. Gray (New York: 2011), 174–181. Hoffmann, George. “Neither one nor the other and both together,” er 25 (1991): 79–90. Honoré, Louis. “À propos de Rabelais, ‘calloier des isles Hières’,” Var historique et géographique (1931): 267–268. Hormaechea, Gabriel. “Traducir a Rabelais,” 1611. Revista de historia de la traducción 6 (2012). http://www.traduccionliteraria.org/1611/art/hormaechea.htm. Huchon, Mireille. Rabelais (Paris: 2011). Huchon, Mireille. Rabelais grammairien: De l’histoire du texte aux problèmes d’authenticité, (er) 16 (Geneva: 1981). Huchon, Mireille. “Stéganographie rabelaisienne: Des endroits secrets désignés par le maître,” ar 1 (2017): 85–99. Huchon, Mireille. “Rabelais et les théologiens,” in Religion et littérature à la Renaissance, ed. F. Roudaut (Paris: 2012), 121–135. Huchon, Mireille. “Apicius restauré, Rabelais sustenté,” in Stylus: La parole dans ses formes. Mélanges en l’honneur du professeur Jacqueline Dangel, eds. M. Baratin, C. Lévy, R. Utard, and A. Videau (Paris: 2010), 521–533. Huchon, Mireille. “Les rires de Rabelais,” in Rire à la Renaissance, ed. M.M. Fontaine (Geneva: 2010), 123–139. Huchon, Mireille. “Rabelais et les satires de la Nef des folz de 1530,” in La Satire dans tous ses états, ed. B. Renner (Geneva: 2009), 77–92. Huchon, Mireille. “Rabelais éditeur et auteur chez Gryphe,” in Quid novi? Sébastien Gryphe à l’occasion du 450e anniversaire de sa mort, ed. R. Mouren (Lyon: 2008), 201– 218.

bibliography

595

Huchon, Mireille. “Rabelais et le vulgaire illustre,” in La langue de Rabelais et la langue de Montaigne. Actes du colloque de Rome, septembre 2003, eds. J. Céard and F. Giacone, (er) 48 (Geneva: 2008), 19–39. Huchon, Mireille. “Rabelais, les universités et la mobilité: les phantasmes du Pantagruel à des fins de propagande,” in Les échanges entre les universités européennes à la Renaissance, eds. M. Bideaux and M.-M. Fragonard (Geneva: 2003), 143–158. Huchon, Mireille. “Le Tiers Livre édité par Jean Céard,” in Le Tiers Livre. Actes du Colloque international de Rome, mars 1996, ed. F. Giacone, (er) 37 (Geneva: 1999), 99– 106. Huchon, Mireille. “La poétique dévoyée du Tiers livre,” in Rabelais et le Tiers livre, ed. E. Kotler (Nice: 1996), 97–115. Huchon, Mireille. “Archéologie du ve Livre,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 19–28. Huchon, Mireille. “Variations rabelaisiennes sur l’imposition du nom,” in Prose et prosateurs de la Renaissance (Paris: 1988), 93–100. Huchon, Mireille. “Rabelais et les genres d’escrire,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 226–247. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: 1955). Huon, Antoinette. “Alexandrie et l’alexandrinisme dans le Quart Livre: l’escale à Medamothi,” er 1 (1957): 98–111. Iancu, Danièle. Les juifs en Provence, 1475–1501: De l’insertion à l’expulsion (Marseille: 1981). Inglis, David. A Sociological History of Excretory Experience: Defecatory Manners and Toiletry Technology (Lewiston, NY: 2001). Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communications in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore-London: 1974). Jacob, Christian. “La Mimésis géographique en Grèce antique: Regards, parcours, mémoire,” in Sémiotique de l’architecture: Espace et représentation. Penser l’espace (Paris: 1982), 53–80. Jacques-Lefèvre, Nicole. “Such an Impure, Cruel, and Savage Beast: Images of the Werewolf in Demonological Works,” in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. K.A. Edwards (Kirkville: 2002), 181–197. Jal, Augustin. Glossaire nautique: Répertoire polyglotte de termes de marine anciens et modernes (Paris: 1848). Jal, Augustin. “Sur les navigations de Pantagruel,” in Archéologie navale, vol. ii, Mémoire 9 (Paris: 1840), 426–528. Jansen, Bernhard. The English Rabelais: Untersuchungen zu Sir Thomas Urquharts Übersetzung des Gargantua aus dem Jahr 1653 (Aachen: 1989).

596

bibliography

Jauss, Hans-Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: 1978). Jeanneret, Michel. Perpetuum mobile: Métamorphoses des corps et des œuvres de Vinci à Montaigne (Paris: 1997, repr. Geneva: 2016). Jeanneret, Michel. Le défi des signes: Rabelais et la crise de l’interprétation à la Renaissance (Orléans: 1994). Jeanneret, Michel. Des mets et des mots: Banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Paris: 1987); English trans. A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. J. Whiteley and E. Hughes (Cambridge, Eng.: 1991). Jeanneret, Michel. “La lecture en question: Sur quelques prologues comiques du seizième siècle,” ff 14.3 (1989): 279–289. Jeanneret, Michel. “Parler en mangeant: Rabelais et la tradition symposiaque,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 275–281. Jeanneret, Michel. “Gargantua 4–24: L’uniforme et le discontinu,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 87– 101. Jochnowitz, George. “Shuadit: La langue juive de Provence,” Archives juives 14 (1978): 63–67. Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: 1990). Journal of the History of Ideas 59.4 (1998). Jung, Marc-René. Hercule dans la littérature française du xvie siècle: De l’Hercule courtois à l’Hercule baroque (Geneva: 1966). Kahn, Didier. Alchimie et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (Geneva: 2007). Kammerer, Elsa. Copia ridiculorum. Rabelais sur le métier de Fischart (1575–1590) (forthcoming). Kammerer, Elsa and Hélène Boisson. Traduction inédite de l’Avant-propos hypothétique de Gottlob Regis à sa traduction de Rabelais (1832–1841) (forthcoming). Kammerer, Elsa. “Toute de miel: La Gargamelle de Johann Fischart (1575–1590),” in Textes au corps: Promenades et musardises sur les terres de Marie Madeleine Fontaine, eds. D. Kahn, E. Kammerer, A.-H. Klinger-Dollé, M. Molins, and A.-P. Pouey-Mounou (Geneva: 2015), 33–49. Kappler, Claude. Monstres, démons et merveilles à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: 1980). Kellner, Beate. “Fischarts Geschichtklitterung und Rabelais’ Gargantua: Komparatistische Perspektiven,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 59 (2009): 149–167. Keohane, Nannerl O. Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton: 1980). Kessler-Mesguisch, Sophie. Les études hébraïques en France, de François Tissard à Richard Simon (1508–1680) (Geneva: 2013).

bibliography

597

Kinser, Samuel. Rabelais’s Carnival: Text, Context, Metatext (Berkeley-Los AngelesOxford: 1990). Kleinschmidt, Erich. “Die konstruierte Bibliothek: Zu Johann Fischarts ‘Catalogus catalogorum’ (1590),” Études germaniques 50 (1995): 541–555. Knecht, Robert J. Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis i (Cambridge, Eng.: 1994). Koopmans, Jelle. “L’inspiration livresque et l’inspiration théâtrale: Le texte et le livre à l’époque de Rabelais,” in Rabelais et l’hybridité des récits rabelaisiens, eds. D. Desrosiers-Bonin, C. La Charité, C. Veilleux, and T. Vigliano, (er) 56 (Geneva: 2017), 87–99. Koopmans, Jelle. “‘Recueil de farces’: Histoire d’une notion et d’une pratique du xixe siècle à Gustave Cohen,” in Les pères du théâtre médiéval: Examen critique de la constitution d’un savoir académique, eds. M. Bouhaïk-Gironès, V. Dominguez, and J. Koopmans (Rennes: 2010), 157–177. Koopmans, Jelle. “Rabelais et l’esprit de la farce,” in Les grands jours de Rabelais en Poitou. Actes du colloque international de Poitiers, 30 août–1er septembre 2001, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget, (er) 43 (Geneva: 2002), 299–311. Koopmans, Jelle. “La tradition des pronostications,” in Éditer et publier Rabelais à travers les âges, ed. P. Smith (Amsterdam-Atlanta: 1997), 35–65. Kotler, Eliane. “La question du mariage de Panurge: Une enquête sur les limites du dialogue,” Cahiers Textuel 15 (1996): 33–47. Kraaijveld, Enny E. “Les premiers traducteurs de Gargantua: Urquhart lecteur de Fischart,” er 25 (1991): 125–130. Krailsheimer, Alban J. Rabelais and the Franciscans (Oxford: 1963). Krailsheimer, Alban J. “The Andouilles of the Quart Livre,” in François Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort, 1553–1953 (Geneva: 1953), 226– 232. Kris, Ernst. Le style rustique (1926; repr. Paris: 2005). Kritzman, Lawrence. The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge, Eng.: 1991). Kundera, Milan. Les testaments trahis (Paris: 1993); English trans. Testaments Betrayed, trans. L. Asher (London: 1993). Kundera, Milan. L’art du roman (Paris: 1986). Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel (London-Boston: 1986). Kuperty-Tsur, Nadine. “De l’hybridité générique au sens: Genre, sexe et construction du savoir dans le chapitre 15 de Pantagruel,” in Rabelais et l’hybridité des récits rabelaisiens, eds. D. Desrosiers-Bonin, C. La Charité, C. Veilleux, and T. Vigliano (er) 56 (Geneva: 2017), 249–262. La Charité, Claude. Rabelais éditeur du Pronostic: “La voix véritable d’Hippocrate” (Paris: forthcoming).

598

bibliography

La Charité, Claude. “Rabelais lecteur de l’Art médical de Galien,” International Conference La réception de Galien à l’époque de Rabelais, McGill University, 1 April 2014 (forthcoming). La Charité, Claude. “Veluti per transennam: Formes de l’annotation dans les travaux de philologie médicale de Rabelais,” in Apta compositio: Formes du texte latin au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, eds. M. Furno, C. Louette, and V. Méot-Bourquin (Geneva: 2017), 195–212. La Charité, Claude. “‘Venes jugulares, et arteres sphagitides’: Rabelais annotateur de Nature de l’homme d’Hippocrate dans la traduction d’Andrea Brenta,” ar 1 (2017): 203–227. La Charité, Claude. “Rabelais traducteur d’Hippocrate: La restitution ‘ex Græco codice’ de passages du Pronostic et du Régime dans les maladies aiguës omis par Guillaume Cop,” in Paroles dégelées. Propos de l’Atelier xvie siècle, eds. I. Garnier, V.D. Le Flanchec, V. Montagne, A. Réach-Ngô, M.-C. Thomine, T. Tran, and N. Viet (Paris: 2016), 311–354. La Charité, Claude. “La bibliothèque hippocratique de Rabelais dans Gargantua, l’Almanach de 1535, le Tiers livre et le Cinquiesme livre,” in Les labyrinthes de l’esprit: Collections et bibliothèques à la Renaissance, eds. R. Gorris-Camos and A. Vanautgaerden (Geneva: 2015), 45–74. La Charité, Claude. “Rabelais lecteur d’Hippocrate dans le Quart livre,” in Langue et sens du Quart livre, ed. F. Giacone (Paris: 2012), 233–268. La Charité, Claude. “Rabelais’s Lost Stratagemata (ca. 1539): A Commentary on Frontinus,” in The Unfolding of Words: Commentary in the Age of Erasmus, eds. J. Rice Henderson and P.M. Swan, trans. K. Mak and N. Senior (Toronto: 2012), 167– 187. La Charité, Claude. “La disputation par signes et la philochirosophie,” in Rabelais et la question du sens. Actes du colloque international de Cerisy, août 2000, eds. J. Céard, M.-L. Demonet-Launay, and S. Geonget, (er) 49 (Geneva: 2011), 15–36. La Charité, Claude. “La satire et l’odyssée des erreurs du xvie siècle,” in Rabelais: Aux confins des mondes possibles. Quart Livre, ed. M. Marrache-Gouraud (Paris: 2011), 65–89. La Charité, Claude. “La proposopée chez Rabelais,” in Savoirs et fins de la représentation sous l’Ancien Régime, eds. A. Cloutier, C. Dubeau, and P.-M. Gendron (Quebec: 2005), 9–19. La Charité, Raymond C. Recreation, Reflection and Re-Creation: Perspectives on Rabelais’s Pantagruel (Lexington: 1980). La Charité, Raymond C. (ed.). Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art (Lexington, KY: 1986). La Garanderie, Marie-Madeleine de, and Daniel Franklin Penham (eds.). Le passage de l’Hellénisme au Christianisme (Paris: 1993).

bibliography

599

LaGuardia, David. Intertextual Masculinity in French Literature: Rabelais, Brantôme, and the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles (Aldershot: 2008). Langer, Ullrich. Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: 1994). Langer, Ullrich. “Liberté chrétienne et liberté stoïcienne: L’abbaye de Thélème,” in Stoïcisme et christianisme à la Renaissance, ed. A. Tarrête (Cahiers V.-L. Saulnier) 18 (Paris: 2006), 59–70. Lauvergnat-Gagnière, Christiane. Lucien de Samosate et le lucianisme en France: Athéisme et polémique (Geneva: 1988). Lauvergnat-Gagnière, Christiane. “Renaissance et métamorphose de l’Histoire vraie de Lucien,” Revue des sciences humaines 180.4 (1980): 119–133. Lauvergnat-Gagnière, Christiane. “Rabelais, lecteur de Lucien de Samosate,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 30 (1978): 71–86. Lavéant, Katell, and Marie Bouhaïk-Gironès. “S’associer pour jouer. Actes notariés et pratique théâtrale (xve–xvie siècles),” in Le jeu et l’accessoire: Mélanges en l’honneur du professeur Michel Rousse, eds. M. Bouhaïk-Gironès, D. Hüe, and J. Koopmans (Paris: 2011), 301–318. Lavocat, Françoise. La Syrinx au bûcher: Pan et les satyres à la Renaissance et à l’âge baroque (Geneva: 2005). Lavocat, Françoise. “Danser le roman: Allégorie et fiction dans le ballet du xviie siècle,” in Sur quel pied danser: Danse et littérature, ed. E. Nye (Amsterdam-New York: 2005), 73–89. Lazard, Madeleine. Les avenues de Féminye: Les femmes et la Renaissance (Paris: 2001). Lazard, Madeleine. Rabelais l’humaniste (Paris: 1993). Lazard, Madeleine. “La satire dans le Gargantua,” in La satire au temps de la Renaissance, ed. M.-T. Jones-Davies (Paris: 1986), 81–96. Le Cadet, Nicolas. Rabelais et le théâtre (Paris: 2020). Le Cadet, Nicolas and Adeline Desbois-Ientile. Gargantua (Neuilly: 2017). Le Cadet, Nicolas and Olivier Halévy. Rabelais. Quart Livre (Neuilly: 2011). Le Cadet, Nicolas. L’Evangélisme fictionnel: Les Livres rabelaisiens, le Cymbalum Mundi, l’Heptaméron (1532–1552) (Paris: 2010). Le Cadet, Nicolas. “Le prince, le soldat et le chrétien: Le réquisitoire contre la guerre dans les Adages d’Érasme,” in Lire, interpréter, transmettre les Adages d’Érasme. Proceedings of the Colloquium at the Université Paris-Ouest-Nanterre. March 2014, ed. M.-D. Legrand (forthcoming). Le Cadet, Nicolas. “Les mystères dans Pantagruel,” in Inextinguible Rabelais, eds. M. Huchon, N. Le Cadet, R. Menini (Paris: 2021), 261–281. Le Cadet, Nicolas. “Rabelais et l’ Officina de Ravisius Textor. Pantagruel, i et Gargantua, x,” ar 2 (2018): 253–282. Le Cadet, Nicolas. “Chronique théâtrale,” ar 1 (2017): 475–482.

600

bibliography

Le Cadet, Nicolas. “Rabelais et les rabelaisants: Pour une histoire des querelles critiques au xxe siècle,” ar 1 (2017): 33–83. Le Cadet, Nicolas. “‘Beuveurs tresillustres, et vous Verolez tresprecieux’: Rabelais et les Anagnostes,” rhlf 115 (2015): 261–282. Le Cadet, Nicolas. “La guerre des Andouilles farfelues et l’archipel du Quart Livre (35 à 42),” in Un joyeux quart de sentences, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget, (er) 52 (Geneva: 2012), 35–50. Le Cadet, Nicolas. “Le topos lucianesque des ‘histoires vraies’ et la poétique du Quart Livre,” rhr 74 (June 2012): 7–24. Le Cadet, Nicolas. “Les rééditions de la Pantagrueline Prognostication et le tissage énonciatif chez Rabelais,” er 46 (2008): 115–136. Le Cadet, Nicolas. “L’île des Macræons, ou les ambiguïtés du transitus rabelaisien (Quart livre, chap. xxv à xxviii),” rhr 61 (2005): 51–72. Le Pamphlet en France au xvie siècle (Cahiers V.-L. Saulnier 1) (Paris: 1983). Lebègue, Raymond. “Rabelaisiana: Notes et documents,” bhr 10 (1948): 159–168. Lecointe, Jean. L’idéal et la différence (Geneva: 1993). Lecointe, Jean. “Decorum et art du récit moral dans le Quart livre,” in Un joyeux quart de sentences, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget, (er) 52 (Geneva: 2012), 167–186. Lecointe, Jean. “Les quatre apostoles: Échos de la poétique érasmienne chez Rabelais et Dürer,” rhlf 95 (novembre-décembre 1995): 888–905. Lefranc, Abel. Rabelais: Études sur Gargantua, Pantagruel et le Tiers Livre (Paris: 1953). Lefranc, Abel. Les navigations de Pantagruel: Étude sur la géographie rabelaisienne (Paris: 1904). Lefranc, Abel. “Rabelais et le pouvoir royal,” rss 17 (1930): 191–202. Lefranc, Abel. “Rabelais et les peuples conquis,” rss 2 (1914): 285–288. Lefranc, Abel. “Rabelais secrétaire de Geoffroy d’Estissac et maître des requêtes,”rer 7 (1909): 411–413. Lefranc, Abel. “Un prétendu ve livre de Rabelais,” rer 1 (1903): 29–54, 122–142. Lefranc, Abel. “Deux ‘Plutarque’ inconnus de la bibliothèque de Rabelais,” L’amateur d’autographes 34.6 (1901): 113–128. Lenient, Charles. La satire en France ou la littérature militante au xvie siècle (Paris: 1886). Léonard, Monique. “Anecdotes, exemples et récits secondaires dans le Tiers Livre,” in Rabelais: À propos du Tiers Livre, eds. J. Dauphiné and P. Mironneau (Biarritz: 1995), 71–91. Lestringant, Frank. Le Huguenot et le sauvage, 3rd ed. (Geneva: 2004). Lestringant, Frank. Sous la leçon des vents: Le monde d’André Thevet, cosmographe de la Renaissance (Paris: 2021). Lestringant, Frank. Le livre des îles: Atlas et récits insulaires, de la Genèse à Jules Verne (Geneva: 2002). Lestringant, Frank. Une sainte horreur ou le voyage en eucharistie (Geneva: 1996).

bibliography

601

Lestringant, Frank. Ecrire le monde à la Renaissance: Quinze études sur Rabelais, Postel, Bodin et la littérature géographique (Orléans: 1992). Lestringant, Frank. Mapping the Renaissance World. The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery (Cambridge, UK: 1994). Lestringant, Frank. “‘L’Isle sonante’ et la sphère du monde: À propos de sept dessins de ‘drôlerie’ attribués à Baptiste Pellerin,” in Illustrations inconscientes: Écritures de la Renaissance. Mélanges offerts à Tom Conley, eds. B. Renner and P.J. Usher (Paris: 2014), 93–119. Lestringant, Frank. “Rabelais, Polydore Vergile et ‘la fascination des commencements’,” in Esculape et Dionysos: Mélanges en l’honneur de Jean Céard, eds. J. Dupèbe, F. Giacone, E. Naya, and A.-P. Pouey-Mounou (Geneva: 2008), 727–740. Lestringant, Frank. “Le gouffre et l’atlas, ou la cosmographie infernale de Jean-Baptiste Trento et Pierre Eskrich: La Mappe-Monde nouvelle papistique de 1566,” bhr 69 (2007): 561–588. Lestringant, Frank. “Paysages anthropomorphes à la Renaissance,” in Nature et paysages: L’émergence d’une nouvelle subjectivité à la Renaissance, ed. D. de Courcelles (Paris: 2006), 261–279. Lestringant, Frank. “D’un insulaire en terre ferme: Éléments pour une lecture topographique du Cinquiesme Livre, ou l’autre monde de Rabelais,” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 81–101. Lestringant, Frank. “Dans la bouche des géants (Pantagruel, 32; Gargantua, 38),” Cahiers Textuel 4/5 (1989): 43–52. Lestringant, Frank. “L’insulaire de Rabelais, ou la fiction en archipel,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 249–274. Leushuis, Reinier. Le mariage et l’‘amitié courtoise’ dans le dialogue et le récit bref de la Renaissance (Florence: 2003). Leveleux, Corinne. La parole interdite: Le blasphème dans la France médiévale, xiiie– xvie siècles: Du péché au crime (Paris: 2001). Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Mythologiques 1: Le cru et le cuit (Paris: 1962). Liaroutzos, Chantal. “La poétique des listes dans le Quart livre,” in En relisant le Quart livre de Rabelais, eds. N. Dauvois and J. Vignes. Cahiers Textuel 35 (2012): 101–109. Ligier, Hermann. La politique de Rabelais (Paris: 1880). Lintner, Dorothée. “Polygraphie comique chez Rabelais et Furetière,” Papers on French 17th Century Literature 74 (2011): 107–120. Lodge, Anthony. A Sociolinguistic History of Parisian French (Cambridge, Eng.: 2004). Lorblanchet, Hélène. François Rabelais et l’École de médecine de Montpellier (Montpellier: 2015). Losse, Deborah. Rhetoric at Play: Rabelais and Satirical Eulogy (Bern: 1980).

602

bibliography

Losse, Deborah. “The thematic and structural unity in the symposium of Rabelais’s Tiers Livre,” Romance Notes 16.2 (1975): 390–405. Lote, Georges. “La politique de Rabelais (iii): L’empire, la papauté,” Revue de cours et conférences (February 1936): 464–480. Lote, Georges. “La politique de Rabelais (ii): L’Angleterre, l’empire,” Revue des cours et conférences 37.4 (1936): 332–347. Lote, Georges. “La politique de Rabelais (i): Principes et théories,” Revue des cours et conférences 37.1 (1935): 64–79. Lubac, Henri de. Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’écriture (Paris: 1959). Lunel, Armand. “Quelques aspects du parler judéo-comtadin,” L’arche 94 (November 1964): 43–45. Magdelaine, Caroline. Histoire du texte et édition critique, traduite et commentée des Aphorismes d’Hippocrate, PhD thesis (University of Paris-Sorbonne: 1994). Magdelaine, Caroline. “Rabelais éditeur d’Hippocrate,” in Lire les médecins grecs à la Renaissance: Aux origines de l’édition médicale. Actes du colloque international de Paris (19–20 septembre 2003), eds. V. Boudon-Millot and G. Cobolet (Paris: 2004), 61– 83. Maillard, Jean-François. “Échos ésotériques dans le Cinquiesme livre?” in Le Cinquiesme Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone, (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 215–226. Major, Adrienne. The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (2000; repr. with new introduction, Princeton: 2011). Malenfant, Marie-Claude. Argumentaires de l’une et l’autre espèce de femme: Le statut de l’exemplum dans les discours littéraires sur la femme (1500–1550) (Quebec: 2003). Mallary Masters, George. Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic Hermetic Tradition (Albany: 1969). Margolin, Jean-Claude. Guerre et paix dans la pensée d’Érasme (Paris: 1973). Margolin, Jean-Claude. “Érasme et le silence,” in Mélanges sur la littérature de la Renaissance à la mémoire de V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1984), 163–178. Marichal, Robert. “Le Quart Livre de 1548,” er 9 (1971): 131–174. Marichal, Robert. “Quart Livre. Commentaires,” er 5 (1964): 65–162. Marichal, Robert. “Le nom des vents chez Rabelais,” er 1 (1956): 1–28. Marichal, Robert. “Le dernier séjour de Rabelais à Rome,” Congrès de Tours et Poitiers (3–9 septembre 1953). Actes du Congrès (Paris: 1954), 104–132. Marichal, Robert. “L’attitude de Rabelais devant le néoplatonisme et l’italianisme (Quart Livre, chap. ix à xi),” in François Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort. 1553–1953 (Geneva: 1953), 181–209. Marichal, Robert. “Rabelais, fut-il Maître des Requêtes?,” bhr 10 (1948): 169–178. Marrache-Gouraud, Myriam (ed.). Rabelais, aux confins des mondes possibles. Quart Livre (Paris: 2011).

bibliography

603

Marrache-Gouraud, Myriam. “Hors toute intimidation.” Panurge ou la parole singulière, (er) 41 (Geneva: 2003). Marrache-Gouraud, Myriam. “Le pantagruélisme du Quart Livre, ou les intermittences de la joie,” in Un joyeux quart de sentences, eds. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget, (er) 52 (Geneva: 2012), 123–140. Martin, Daniel. “Panurge lapidaire: Une lecture de Pantagruel, chapitre xxiv,” Bulletin de l’Association d’étude sur l’humanisme, la réforme et la renaissance 58 (2004): 43– 57. Martin, Henry-Jean. La naissance du livre moderne: Mise en page et mise en texte du livre français (xive–xviie siècles) (Paris: 2000). Martínez, Caridad. “Introducción a las traducciones de Rabelais a las lenguas hispánicas,” in Transferencias de temas, transferencias de textos: Mitos, leyendas y lenguas entre Cataluña y Languedoc, eds. M.-M. Fragonard and C. Martínez (Barcelona: 1997), 105–115. Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle. “Bisexualité et animalité fabuleuse,” Corps écrit 6 (1983): 159–169. Matoré, Georges. Le vocabulaire et la société du xvie siècle (Paris: 1988). Mayer, Claude-Albert. Lucien de Samosate et la Renaissance française (Geneva: 1984). Mayer, Claude-Albert. “Rabelais’ Satyrical Eulogy: The Praise of Borrowing,” in François Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort. 1553–1953 (Geneva: 1953), 147–155. McDowell, Nicholas. “Urquhart’s Rabelais: Translation, Patronage, and Cultural Politics,” English Literary Renaissance 35 (2005): 273–303. McKinley, Mary B. “Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre et la dédicace du Tiers livre: Voyages mystiques et missions terrestres,” rr 94 (2003): 169–183. McPhail, Eric. “The elegance of the Écolier Limousin: The European Context of Rabelais’ Linguistic Parody,” Modern Language Notes 123 (2008): 873–894. Ménager, Daniel. La Renaissance et le rire (Paris: 1995). Ménager, Daniel. Rabelais en toutes lettres (Paris: 1989). Ménager, Daniel. “Les pavots de Tarquin: Enigme et devinette dans les chapitres lxiii et lxiv du Quart Livre,” in L’énigmatique à la Renaissance: formes, significations, esthétiques, ed. D. Martin (Paris: 2008), 65–77. Ménager, Daniel. “La politique du don dans les derniers chapitres du Gargantua,” jmrs 8.2 (1978): 179–191. Menini, Romain. Rabelais altérateur: Graeciser en François (Paris: 2014). Menini, Romain. Rabelais et l’intertexte platonicien, (er) 47 (Geneva: 2009). Menini, Romain. “Rabelais et Aulu Gelle, de l’atelier de Gryphe aux fèves en gousse,”er 57 (2019), 19–50. Menini, Romain and Olivier Pédeflous. “‘Æsope le François’: Autour de dix-sept fables ésopiques éditées par Rabelais,” in Séductions de la fable, eds. F. Calas and N. Viet (Paris: 2015), 193–222.

604

bibliography

Menini, Romain and Olivier Pédeflous. “Dans l’atelier de François Juste: Rabelais passeur de la Batrachomyomachie,” in Passeurs de textes ii: Gens du livre et gens de lettres à la Renaissance, eds. C. Bénévent, I. Diu, and C. Lastraioli (Turnhout: 2014), 98–117. Menini, Romain and Olivier Pédeflous. “Les marginales de l’amitié: Pierre Lamy et Nicolas Bérauld lecteurs de Lucien de Samosate (BnF Rés. Z. 247),” bhr 74.1 (2012): 35–70. Menini, Romain. “‘Babillebabou (disoit il) voicy pis qu’antan’: L’onomatopée dans le Quart Livre,” in Styles, genres, auteurs, no. 11, eds. A. Arzoumanov and C. Narjoux (Paris: 2011), 37–54. Mentzer, Raymond A. and Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (eds.). A Companion to the Huguenots (bcct) 68 (Leiden: 2016). Merlin-Kajman, Hélène. La langue est-elle fasciste? Langue, pouvoir, enseignement (Paris: 2003). Mesnard, Jean. “Sur le terme et la notion de philautie,” in Mélanges sur la littérature de la Renaissance à la mémoire de V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva: 1984), 197–214. Michel, Alain. La parole et la beauté (Paris: 1994). Miernowski, Jan. “The Prologue of Gargantua; or, a Lesson in Scandal Management,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais, eds. T.W. Reeser and F. Gray (New York: 2011), 100–109. Milhe Poutingon, Gérard. François Rabelais, Pantagruel (Paris: 2010). Milhe Poutingon, Gérard. François Rabelais: Bilan critique (Paris: 1996). Mombello, Gianni. “Claude de Seyssel: Un esprit modéré au service de l’expansion française,” in Culture et pouvoir au temps de l’Humanisme et de la Renaissance, ed. L. Terreaux (Geneva-Paris: 1978), 71–119. Monferran, Jean-Charles. “Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre: Approches stylistiques et rhétoriques du chapitre ix,” L’information grammaticale 68 (1996): 6–10. Monfort, Marie-Laure. L’apport de Janus Cornarius (ca. 1500–1558) à l’édition et à la traduction de la collection hippocratique, PhD thesis (University Paris-Sorbonne: 1998). Monfort, Marie-Laure. “Les Aphorismes de Rabelais,” in Janus Cornarius et la redécouverte d’Hippocrate à la Renaissance (Turnhout: 2017), 103–111. Morrison, Susan Signe. The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter (London: 2015). Morrison, Susan Signe. Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (London: 2008). Moulinas, Robert. Les Juifs du Pape en France: Les communautés d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaisssin (Paris: 1981). Mounier, Pascale. Le roman humaniste: un genre novateur français. 1532–1564 (Paris: 2007). Mousnier, Roland. État et société sous François ier et pendant le gouvernement personnel de Louis xiv (Paris: 1966).

bibliography

605

Muchembled, Robert. La violence au village (Brussels: 1989). Müller, Jan-Dirk. “Universalbibliothek und Gedächtnis: Aporien frühneuzeitlicher Wissenskodifikation bei Conrad Gesner (Mit einem Ausblick auf Antonio Possevino, Theodor Zwinger und Johann Fischart),” in Erkennen und Erinnern in Kunst und Literatur, eds. D. Peil et al. (Tübingen: 1998), 285–309. Nahon, Peter. Les parlers français des Israélites du Midi, Ph.D. thesis (Paris-Sorbonne, 2020). Nash, Jerry. “Further reflections on the character portrayal of Panurge as the Devil,” in A French Forum: Mélanges de la littérature française offerts à Raymond C. et Virginie A. La Charité, eds. G. Defaux and J. Nash (Paris: 2000), 77–85. Naya, Emmanuel. Rabelais: Une anthropologie humaniste des passions (Paris: 1998). Naya, Emmanuel. “‘Ne scepticque ne dogmatique, et tous les deux ensemble’: Rabelais ‘On Phronistere et escholle des pyrrhoniens’,” er 35 (1998): 81–129. Nef, John. La naissance de la civilisation industrielle et le monde contemporain (Paris: 1954). Neri, Ferdinando. Rabelais e il suo tempo (Turin: 1948). Nilles, Camilla. “The Economy of Owing: Rabelais’ Praise of Debts,” Etudes de lettres. Revue de la Faculté des lettres de l’Université de Lausanne 2 (April–June 1984): 73–88. Nutton, Vivian. “Rabelais’s copy of Galen,” er 22 (1988): 181–187. Nykrog, Per. “Thélème, Panurge et la Dive bouteille,” rhlf 65 (1965): 385–397. Oates, Carolyn F. “Metamorphosis,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. R. Golden (Santa Barbara: 2006). O’Brien, John (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Rabelais (Cambridge, Eng.: 2011). Ogino, Anna. Les éloges paradoxaux dans le Tiers et le Quart Livre de Rabelais: Enquête sur le comique et le cosmique à la Renaissance (Tokyo: 1989). Pagliaroli, Stefano. L’Erodoto del Valla (Messina: 2006). Parkin, John. “The Polygelastic Rabelais,” er 44 (2006): 44–62. Pasquier, Alain. “Un cratère-rafraîchissoir au musée du Louvre: Du vin frais pour un banquet de luxe,” Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot 78 (2000): 5– 51. Paul, Jean. Vorschule der Ästhetik, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. N. Miller, vol. 5 (Munich: 1963). Pédeflous, Olivier. Dans l’atelier de Rabelais: Des recherches philologico-antiquaires à l’archéologie de la geste de Pantagruel, PhD thesis (University of Paris: 2013). Périgot, Béatrice. “L’éloge ambigu du prince dans le Gargantua de Rabelais,” in L’éloge du Prince: De l’Antiquité au temps des Lumières, eds. I. Cogitore and F. Goyet (Grenoble: 2003), 189–208. Périgot, Béatrice. “Rabelais et le modèle épique de l’Arioste,” in L’épopée et ses modèles de la Renaissance aux Lumières, eds. F. Greiner and J.-C. Ternaux (Paris: 2002), 89–102.

606

bibliography

Perrat, Charles. “Autour du juge Bridoye: Rabelais et le De Nobilitate de Tiraqueau,”bhr 16 (1954): 41–57. Perrat, Charles. “Le Polydore Virgile de Rabelais,” bhr 11 (1949): 167–204. Persels, Jeffery C., and Russell Ganim (eds.). Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology (Farnham: 2004). Persels, Jeffery C. “‘The Mass and the Fart are Sisters’: Scatology and Calvinist Rhetoric against the Mass, 1560–63,” in Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology (Farnham: 2004), 38–55. Persels, Jeffery C. “Cooking with the Pope: The Language of Food and Protest in Calvinist and Catholic Polemic from the 1560s,” Mediaevalia 22 (1999): 30–53. Persels, Jeffery C. “ ‘Straitened in the bowels’ or, Concerning the Rabelaisian Trope of Defecation,” in Actes des conférences du Cycle “Rabelais et la nature” organisé durant l’année 1994, ed. F. Metivier, (er) 31 (Geneva: 1996), 101–112. Pfeffer, Georg. “Deux notices inédites de Johann Gottlob Regis,” rer 3 (1905): 72– 79. Philipot, Emmanuel. “Notes sur quelques farces de la Renaissance,” rer 9 (1911): 365– 422. Plan, Pierre-Paul. Les éditions de Rabelais de 1532 à 1711 (Paris: 1904). Plan, Pierre-Paul. “Rabelais et les ‘moraulx de Plutarche’: À propos d’un ex-libris,” Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 26 (1906): 195–249. Plattard, Jean. François Rabelais (Paris: 1932). Plattard, Jean. The Life of François Rabelais, trans. L.P. Roche (New York: 1931). Plattard, Jean. L’œuvre de Rabelais (sources, invention, composition) (1910; repr. Paris: 1967). Plattard, Jean. “Rabelais et le gouvernement royal,” rss 17 (1930): 191–202. Plattard, Jean. “L’invective de Gargantua contre les mariages contractés ‘sans le sceu et adveu’ des parents (Tiers Livre, chap. 48),” rss 14 (1927): 381–388. Plattard, Jean. “Le Galien de Rabelais à la bibliothèque de Sheffield,”rss 13 (1926): 303– 304. Pócs, Eva. “Hungary and Southeastern Europe, Magic,” in Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, ed. R. Golden (Santa Barbara: 2006). Polizzi, Gilles. “Thélème ou l’éloge du don: Le texte rabelaisien à la lumière de l’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” rhr 27 (December 1987): 39–59. Pons, Emile. “Les langages imaginaires dans le voyage utopique: Les ‘jargons’ de Panurge dans Rabelais,” Revue de littérature comparée 11 (1931): 185–218. Porcher, Jean (ed.). Rabelais. Exposition organisée à l’occasion du quatrième centenaire de la publication de Pantagruel (Paris: 1933). Pouey-Mounou, Anne-Pascale and Paul J. Smith (eds.). Langues hybrides: expérimentations linguistiques et littéraires (xve-début xviie siècle). Hybridsprachen: Linguistische und literarische Untersuchungen (15.-Anfang 17. Jh) (Geneva: 2019).

bibliography

607

Pouey-Mounou, Anne-Pascale. Panurge comme lard en pois: Paradoxe, scandale et propriété dans le Tiers Livre, (er) 53 (Geneva: 2013). Pouilloux, Jean-Yves. Rabelais: Rire est le propre de l’homme (Paris: 1993). Poujol, Jacques. “1515: Cadre idéologique du développement de l’absolutisme en France à l’avènement de François ier,” in Théorie et pratique politiques à la Renaissance: xviie colloque international de Tours (Paris: 1977), 259–272. Praeger, David and Paul Provenza. Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product (Los Angeles: 2007). Prescott, Anne Lake. Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven: 1998). Prevenier, Walter. “Quand un honorable bourgeois de Malines, ‘marié avec une bonne et honeste femme’, s’encanaille dans une troupe de théâtre en marge de la bonne société (1475),” in La permission et la sanction: Théories légales et pratiques du théâtre (xive–xviie siècle), eds. M. Bouhaïk-Gironès, J. Koopmans, and K. Lavéant (Paris: 2017), 141–163. Quesnel, Colette. Mourir de rire d’après et avec Rabelais (Montreal: 1991). Quintero, Ruben (ed.). A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern (Malden: 2007). Rabelais éditeur des anciens et des modernes, in ar 2 (2018): 17–212. Racaut, Luc. Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Farnham: 2002). Raimondi, Ezio. “Un lettore barocco di Rabelais,” Convivium 25.2 (1957): 149–163. Randall, Michael. The Gargantuan Polity: On the Individual and Community in the French Renaissance (Toronto: 2008). Rawles, Stephen. “What Did Rabelais Really Know about Printing and Publishing?” in Editer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges, ed. P.J. Smith (Amsterdam-Atlanta: 1997), 9–34. Reeser, Todd W. and Floyd Gray (eds.). Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais (New York: 2011). Reeser, Todd W. Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: 2006). Regan, Shaun. “Translating Rabelais: Sterne, Motteux, and the Culture of Politeness,” Translation and Literature 10.2 (2001): 174–199. Renner, Bernd and Phillip J. Usher (eds.). Illustrations inconscientes: Écritures de la Renaissance. Mélanges offerts à Tom Conley (Paris: 2014). Renner, Bernd (ed.). La Satire dans tous ses états: Le “meslange satyricque” à la Renaissance française (Geneva: 2009). Renner, Bernd. “Difficile est saturam non scribere”: L’herméneutique de la satire rabelaisienne, (er) 45 (Geneva: 2007). Renner, Bernd. “‘Par craincte de (re)tomber en ceste vulgaire et satyrique mocquerie’: Structures satiriques des Tiers, Quart et Cinquième Livres,” in Inextinguible Rabelais, eds. M. Huchon, N. Le Cadet, R. Menini (Paris: 2021), 593–607. Renner, Bernd. “Rabelais, Fischart et Urquhart à Thélème: Ambiguïté et utilité du modèle utopique,” ar 4 (2020): 101–123.

608

bibliography

Renner, Bernd. “Cartographie satirique: la rhétorique de l’espace dans la guerre picrocholine (Gargantua, chap. 33),” in La Renaissance au grand large. Mélanges en l’honneur de Frank Lestringant, eds. V. Ferrer, O. Millet, and A. Tarrête (Geneva: 2019), 395–404. Renner, Bernd. “‘Découvrir le pot aux roses’. Critique et polémique,” ar 2 (2018): 429– 433. Renner, Bernd. “La fin du Quart Livre: Apogée du meslange satiricque,” in Rabelais et l’hybridité des récits rabelaisiens, eds. D. Desrosiers-Bonin, C. La Charité, C. Veilleux, and T. Vigliano, (er) 56 (Geneva: 2017), 311–324. Renner, Bernd. “‘Qu’un fol enseigne bien un saige’: Folie et ironie dans le Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” ar 1 (2017): 161–181. Renner, Bernd. “From Satura to Satyre: François Rabelais and the Renaissance Appropriation of a Genre,” rq 67.2 (2014): 377–424. Renner, Bernd. “Provocation et perplexité: Le double éloge paradoxal des dettes et du langage (Tiers Livre, ii à v),” er 50 (2010): 45–65. Renner, Bernd. “Changes in Renaissance Epistemology: The Dialogism of Rabelais’s Prologues,” in Charting Change in France around 1540, ed. M. Rothstein (Selinsgrove: 2006), 186–212. Renner, Bernd. “‘Ni l’un ni l’autre et tous les deux à la fois’: Le paradoxe ménippéen dans le Tiers livre de Rabelais,” rr 97 (2006): 153–168. Renner, Bernd. “Alea iacta judiciorum est: Legal Satire and the Problem of Interpretation in Rabelais,” Comitatus 35 (2004): 83–107. Renner, Bernd. “From Fearsome to Fearful: Panurge’s Satirical Waning” in Fear and its Representations in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. A. Scott, C. Kosso (asmar) 6 (Turnhout: 2002), 206–237. Ricci, Seymour de. “Les autographes de Rabelais,” in Rabelais à travers les âges, ed. J. Boulenger (Paris: 1925), 216–245. Ricœur, Paul. La métaphore vive (Paris: 1975). Rieger, Dietmar. Imaginäre Bibliotheken: Bücherwelten in der Literatur (Munich: 2002). Rigolot, François. Le texte de la Renaissance: Des rhétoriqueurs à Montaigne (Geneva: 1982). Rigolot, François. Poétique et onomastique: L’exemple de la Renaissance (Geneva: 1977). Rigolot, François. Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva: 1972, 1996). Rigolot, François. “Rabelais and Hybridity,” in Approaches to Teaching Rabelais, eds. T.W. Reeser and F. Gray (New York: 2011), 37–46. Rigolot, François. “Hybridity, exemplarity, and dialogism in a historical perspective: Rabelais’s dialogue on dialogue with Lucian,” in Der Dialog im Diskursfeld seiner Zeit: Von der Antike bis zur Aufklärung, eds. K.W. Hempfer and A. Traninger (Stuttgart: 2010), 205–217.

bibliography

609

Rigolot, François. “The Three Temptations of Panurge: Women’s Vilification and Christian Humanist Discourse,” in François Rabelais: Critical Assessments, ed. J.-C. Carron (Baltimore: 1995), 83–102. Rigolot, François. “Rabelais, Misogyny, and Christian Charity: Biblical Intertextuality and the Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity,” pmla 109.2 (1994): 225–237. Rigolot, François. “Rabelais et la scolastique: Une affaire de canards (Gargantua 12),” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 102–123. Rigolot, François. “Leda and the Swan: Rabelais’s Parody of Michelangelo,”rq 38.4 (Winter 1985): 688–700. Roberts, Hugh, Guillaume Peureux, and Lise Wajeman (eds.). Obscénités renaissantes (Geneva: 2011). Robinson, Christopher. Lucian and His Influence in Europe (London: 1979). Roe, Frederick C. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Rabelais (Oxford: 1957). Romier, Lucien. “La crise gallicane,” Revue historique, vol. 108, fascicule 2 (1911): 225– 250. Romier, Lucien. “La crise gallicane, suite et fin,” Revue historique, vol. 109, fascicule 1 (1912): 27–55. Romier, Lucien. “Le dernier voyage de Rabelais en Italie,” rer 10 (1912): 113–142. Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: 2004). Rosier, Laurence. Petit traité de l’insulte (Loverval: 2006). Rosolato, Guy. La portée du désir ou la psychanalyse même (Paris: 1996). Rosolato, Guy. Relation d’inconnu (Paris: 1978). Rothstein, Marian. “Androgyne, Agape, and the Abbey of Thélème,” ff 26.1 (2001): 1– 19. Rousset, Jean. Leurs yeux se rencontrèrent: La scène de première vue dans le roman (Paris: 1989). Roy, Bruno. L’hypothèse Triboulet (Orléans: 2009). Russell, Anthony P. “Epic Agon and the Strategy of Reform in Folengo and Rabelais,” Comparative Literature Studies 34 (1997): 119–148. Sainéan, Lazare. L’influence et la réputation de Rabelais: Interprètes, lecteurs et imitateurs. Un Rabelaisien, Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde (Paris: 1930). Sainéan, Lazare. La langue de Rabelais (Paris: 1922–1923). Sainéan Lazare. “Les interprètes de Rabelais en Angleterre et en Allemagne,” rer 7 (1909): 137–258. Salmon, John H.M. Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge, Eng.: 1987). Saulnier, Verdun-Léon. Rabelais i. Rabelais dans son enquête: La sagesse de Gargantua, le Dessein de Rabelais (Paris: 1983).

610

bibliography

Saulnier, Verdun-Léon. Rabelais ii. Rabelais dans son enquête: Étude sur le Quart et le Cinquième Livre (Paris: 1982). Saulnier, Verdun-Léon. “L’énigme du Pantagruélion, ou du Tiers au Quart Livre,” er 1 (1956): 48–72. Schiffer, Cathy. “Contextual Misogyny in the Tiers Livre,” Chimères 17.2 (1984): 53– 67. Schoentjes, Pierre. Poétique de l’ironie (Paris: 2001). Schübler, Walter. Die Rabelais Rezeption im deutschen Sprachraum unter besonderer Berücksichtigung übersetzungswissenschaftlicher Aspekte (Vienna: 1992). Schwartz, Jerome. Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion (1990; repr. Cambridge, Eng.: 2009). Screech, Michael A. Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: 1997). Screech, Michael and Stephen Rawles. A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais before 1626, (er) 20 (Geneva: 1987). Screech, Michael A. Rabelais (London and Ithaca, NY: 1979); French trans. Rabelais, trans. M.-A. de Kisch (Paris: 1992). Screech, Michael A. L’Évangélisme de Rabelais: Aspects de la satire religieuse au xvie siècle, (er) 2 (Geneva: 1959). Screech, Michael A. The Rabelaisian Marriage: Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics and Comic Philosophy (London: 1958); French trans. Rabelais et le mariage. Religion, morale et philosophie du rire, trans. A. Bridge, (er) 28 (Geneva: 1992). Screech, Michael A. “Sagesse de Rabelais: Rabelais et les ‘bons christians’,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 9–15. Screech, Michael A. “Some reflexions on the problem of dating Gargantua, ‘A’ and ‘B’,” er 11 (1974): 9–56. Screech, Michael A. “Folie érasmienne et folie rabelaisienne,” in Colloquia Erasmiana Turonensia, vol. i (Paris: 1972), 441–452. Screech, Michael A. “Some recent Rabelais studies,” er 6 (1965): 61–71. Séguin-Brault, Olivier. “Bibliographie des études rabelaisiennes (2007–2018),” in Almanach de “L’Année rabelaisienne.” https://anneerab.hypotheses.org/bibliographie. Seyssel, Claude de. La monarchie de France et deux autres fragments politiques, ed. J. Poujol (Paris: 1961). Sicard, Claire. “Picrochole au miroir de Charles Quint,” Cornucopia. Le Verger. Bouquet 1 (janvier 2012). http://cornucopia16.com/blog/2014/07/22/janvier‑2012‑claire‑sicard​ ‑u‑paris‑diderot‑picrochole‑au‑miroir‑de‑charles‑quint/. Simonin, Michel. Vivre de sa plume au xvie siècle ou la carrière de François de Belleforest (Geneva: 1992). Skarup, Povl. “Le physétère et l’île Farouche de Rabelais,” er 6 (1965): 57–59. Sleiderink, Remco. “The Brussels Plays of the Seven Sorrows,” in The Seven Sorrows

bibliography

611

Confraternity of Brussels: Drama, Ceremony, and Art Patronage (16th–17th Centuries), ed. E.S. Thelen (Turnhout: 2015), 51–66. Smith, Paul J. Dispositio: Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (Leiden: 2007). Smith, Paul J. (ed.). Éditer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges (Amsterdam-Atlanta: 1997). Smith, Paul J. Voyage et écriture: Étude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais, (er) 19 (Geneva: 1987). Smith, Paul J. “Landscape and Body in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel,” in The Anthropomorphic Lens: Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts, eds. W.S. Melion, B. Rothstein, and M. Weemans (Leiden: 2015), 67–92. Smith, Paul J. “Jean Thenaud and François Rabelais: Some Hypotheses on the Early Reception of Erasmus in French Vernacular Literature,” in The Reception of Erasmus in the Early Modern Period, ed. K.A.E. Enenkel (Leiden: 2013), 211–236. Smith, Paul J. “‘Les âmes anglaises sont andouillettes’: Nouvelles perspectives sur l’épisode des Andouilles (Quart Livre, ch. 35–42),” in Rabelais et la question du sens. Actes du colloque international de Cerisy, août 2000, eds. J. Céard, M.-L. Demonet-Launay, and S. Geonget, (er) 49 (Geneva: 2011), 99–111. Smith, Paul J. “‘Plus feal que ne fut Appoloneus a Damis.’ Rabelais et Jean Thenaud avant 1517: Quelques hypothèses,” in Les grands jours de Rabelais en Poitou. Actes du colloque international de Poitiers, 30 août–1er septembre 2001, ed. M.-L. Demonet and S. Geonget, (er) 43 (Geneva: 2006), 183–194. Smith, Paul J. “Fable ésopique et dispositio épidictique: Pour une approche rhétorique du Pantagruel,” in Rabelais pour le xxie siècle. Actes du Colloque du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Chinon-Tours, 1994, ed. M. Simonin, (er) 33 (Geneva: 1998), 91–104. Smith, Paul J. “‘Croquer pie’: Quart Livre, Ancien Prologue,” in Rabelais—Dionysos: Vin, carnaval, ivresse, ed. M. Bideaux (Marseille: 1997), 97–108. Smith, Paul J. “Rabelais aux Pays-Bas: L’édition Elzevier (1663) et la présence de Rabelais dans les bibliothèques privées des Hollandais,” in Éditer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges, ed. P.J. Smith (Amsterdam-Atlanta: 1997), 141–173. Smith, Paul J. “Rabelais and the Art of Memory,” in Rabelais in Context. Proceedings of the 1991 Vanderbilt Conference, ed. B.C. Bowen (Birmingham, AL: 1993), 41–54. Smith, Paul J. “Voix et geste chez Rabelais,” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 33 (1992): 133–144. Smith, Peter J. Between Two Stools: Scatology and Its Representations in English Literature, Chaucer to Swift (Manchester, UK: 2012). Smith, William Francis. “Rabelais et Servius,” rer 4 (1906): 349–368. Sozzi, Lionello. “Présence de l’Hermétisme dans le Cinquiesme Livre,” in Le Cinquiesme

612

bibliography

Livre. Actes du colloque international de Rome, octobre 1998, ed. F. Giacone, (er) 40 (Geneva: 2001), 199–214. Sozzi, Lionello. “Quelques aspects de la notion de dignitas hominis dans l’œuvre de Rabelais,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 167–174. Sozzi, Lionello. “Physis et Antiphysie, ou de l’arbre inversé,” Études de lettres 2 (1984): 123–133. Spillebout, Gabriel. “Le réalisme chinonais,” in Rabelais en son demi-millénaire. Actes du Colloque international de Tours, septembre 1984, eds. J. Céard and J.-C. Margolin, (er) 21 (Geneva: 1988), 69–75. Spitzer, Leo. “Rabelais et les ‘rabelaisants’,” Studi francesi iv (1960): 401–423; repr. in Études de style (Paris: 1970), 134–165. Staples, Amy. “Primal Scenes/Primal Screens: The Homosocial Economy of Dirty Jokes,” in High Anxiety: Masculinity in Early Modern France, ed. K.P. Long (Kirksville: 2002), 37–54. Starobinski, Jean. “L’ordre du jour,” Le temps de la réflexion 4 (1983): 106–114. Stephens, Walter E. Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: 2002). Stephens, Walter E. Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln, NE: 1989); French trans. Les géants de Rabelais: Folklore, histoire ancienne, nationalisme, trans. F. Preisig (Paris: 2006). Stephens, Walter E. “Discovering the Past: The Renaissance Arch-Forger and his Legacy,” in Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries: Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Arthur and Janet Freeman Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection, ed. E. Havens (Baltimore: 2014), 66–84. Stephens, Walter E. “From Berossos to Berosus Chaldæus: The Forgeries of Annius of Viterbo and their Fortune,” in The World of Berossos: Proceedings of the 4th International Colloquium on “The Ancient Near East between Classical and Ancient Oriental Traditions,” eds. J. Haubold, G.B. Lanfranchi, R. Rollinger, and J. Steele (Wiesbaden: 2013), 277–289. Stephens, Walter E. “The Sceptical Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. B.P. Levack (Oxford, Eng.: 2013), 101– 121. Stephens, Walter E. “Sex, Popular Beliefs, and Culture: ‘In the Waie of Lecherie,’” in A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Renaissance, ed. B. Talvacchia (2011; repr. London: 2014), 137–155. Stephens, Walter E. “De Historia Gigantum: Theological Anthropology before Rabelais,” Traditio 40 (1984): 43–89. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: 1984). Stone, Donald. “Ethical Patterns in Gargantua,” French Review 56.1 (1983): 10–13.

bibliography

613

Strassler, Robert B. (ed.). The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, trans. Andrea L. Purvis (New York: 2007). Sturel, René. “Rabelais et Hippocrate,” rer 6 (1908): 49–55. Telle, Emile V. “Thélème et le paulinisme matrimonial érasmien: Le sens de l’énigme en prophétie (Gargantua, chap. lviii),” in François Rabelais: Ouvrage publié pour le quatrième centenaire de sa mort, 1553–1953 (Geneva: 1953), 104–119. Telle, Emile V. “L’île des Alliances (Quart Livre, chap. ix) ou l’anti-Thélème,” bhr 14 (1952): 159–175. Tetel, Marcel. Rabelais et l’Italie (Florence: 1969). Tetel, Marcel. “Rabelais et Lucien: De deux rhétoriques,” in Rabelais’s Incomparable Book: Essays On His Art, ed. R.C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: 1986), 127–138. Tetel, Marcel. “La fin du Quart livre,” Romanische Forschungen 83 (1971): 517–527. Thijssen-Schoute, C. Louise. Nicolaas Jarichides Wieringa: Een zeventiende-eeuwse vertaler van Boccalini, Rabelais, Barclai, Leti e.a. (Assen: 1939). Thijssen-Schoute, C. Louise. “N.J. Wieringa, traducteur hollandais de Rabelais,”Humanisme et Renaissance 3.1 (1936): 43–51. Thomine, Marie-Claire et al. Naissance du roman moderne: Rabelais, Tiers Livre, Cervantès, Don Quichotte, Sterne, Tristram Shandy (Paris: 2007). Thomine, Marie-Claire. “‘Naissance du roman moderne’: Rabelais, le Tiers Livre,” S16 3 (2007): 267–278. Tin, Louis-Georges. “Le Pantagruelion: Réflexions sur la notion d’exégèse littéraire,” in Rabelais et la question du sens. Actes du colloque international de Cerisy, août 2000, eds. J. Céard, M.-L. Demonet-Launay, and S. Geonget, (er) 49 (Geneva: 2011), 113– 124. Tin, Louis-Georges. “Qu’est-ce que le Pantagruelion?,” er 39 (2000): 125–135. Tinguely, Frédéric. “L’alter sensus des turqueries de Panurge,” er 42 (2003): 57–73. Tinguely, Frédéric. “D’un prologue l’autre: Vers l’inconscience consciente d’Alcofrybas Rabelais,” er 29 (1993): 83–91. Tomarken, Annette. The Smile of Truth: The French Satirical Eulogy and its Antecedents (Princeton: 1990). Tomasik, Timothy and Juliann Vitullo (eds.). At the Table: Metaphorical and Material Cultures of Food in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (asmar) 18 (Turnhout: 2007). Tomasik, Timothy J. “Fishes, Fowl, and La Fleur de toute cuysine: Gaster and Gastronomy in Rabelais’s Quart Livre,” in Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories, ed. J.F. Fitzpatrick (Aldershot: 2010), 25–51. Torrance, Robert. The Comic Hero (London: 1978). Tournon, André. “En sens agile”: Les acrobaties de l’esprit selon Rabelais (Paris: 1995). Tournon, André. “Le ‘langage usité’ selon Rabelais: Norme ou repère?,” in Les normes du dire au xvie siècle, eds. J.-C. Arnould and G. Milhe Poutingon (Paris: 2004), 453–467. Tournon, André. “Un silence signé Rabelais,” Cahiers Textuel 15 (1996): 77–87.

614

bibliography

Tournon, André. “Le Pantagruélisme, mode de lecture du Tiers Livre,” Littératures 33 (1995): 5–16. Tournon, André. “Dynamique de la déraison. La symétrie faussée du Tiers Livre de Pantagruel,” Europe 757 (May 1992): 6–19. Tournon, André. “L’abbé de Thélème,” Saggi e ricerche di Letteratura Francese 26 (1987): 201–220. Tournon, André. “La Briefve Declaration n’est pas de Rabelais,” er 13 (1976): 133–138. Trtnik-Rossettini, Olga. Les influences anciennes et italiennes sur la satire en France au xvie siècle (Florence: 1958). Ugarte-Ballester, Xus. “Oubli versus prolifération de Maître François Rabelais dans la Péninsule Ibérique,” Bulletin hispanique 115-2 (2013): 493–506. Ullmann, Walter. The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: 1966). Upham, Alfred Horatio. The French Influence in English Literature from the Accession of Elizabeth to the Restoration (New York: 1908). Van Kampen, Herman, Herman Pleij et al. (eds.). Het zal koud zijn in ‘t water als ‘t vriest: Zestiende-eeuwe parodieën op gedrukte jaarvoorspellingen (The Hague: 1980). Vega, Julián Bravo. “Eduardo Barriobero, primer traductor español de Rabelais.” https://​ dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/1011606.pdf. Venard, Marc. Réforme protestante, réforme catholique dans la province d’Avignon au xvie siècle (Paris: 1993). Venard, Marc. “Jacques Sadolet, évêque de Carpentras, et les Vaudois,” Bolletino della Società di Studi Valdesi 143 (June 1978): 37–49. Vigliano, Tristan. Humanisme et juste milieu au siècle de Rabelais: Essai de critique illusoire (Paris: 2009). Vigliano, Tristan. “Le pantagruélisme est-il un paganisme? Rabelais et l’amour des ennemis,” er 54 (2015): 7–51. Vigliano, Tristan. “Pour en finir avec le prologue de Gargantua!,” Revue Analyses 3.3 (2008): 263–296. Viguier, Marie-Claire. “Le ‘Sermon des Juifs’ à Carpentras: Carnaval ou Pourim?,” Annales du Midi 187, t. 101 (1989): 235–259. Viguier, Marie-Claire. “Le judéo-occitan existe: Essai sur la ‘lenga juzieva’,” in Juifs et sources juives en Occitanie (Valeriès: 1988), 193–209. Walker, Carolyn Bynum. “Wonder,” American Historical Review 102.1 (1997): 1–26. Wanegffelen, Thierry. Une difficile fidélité: Catholiques malgré le concile en France. xvie– xviie siècles (Paris: 1999). Weinberg, Florence. Rabelais et les leçons du rire: Paraboles évangéliques et néoplatoniciennes (Orléans: 2000). Weinberg, Florence. Gargantua in a Convex Mirror: Fischart’s View of Rabelais (New York-Bern-Frankfurt: 1986). Weinberg, Florence. The Wine and the Will: Rabelais’s Bacchic Christianity (Detroit: 1972).

bibliography

615

Weinberg, Florence. “Layers of Emblematic Prose: Rabelais’ Andouilles,” scj 26.2 (1995): 367–377. Weinbrot, Howard. Menippean Satire Reconsidered (Baltimore: 2005). Werle, Dirk. Copia librorum: Problemgeschichte imaginierter Bibliotheken 1580–1630 (Tübingen: 2007). Whibley, Charles. “Rabelais en Angleterre,” rer 1 (1903): 1–12. Williams, Wes. Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic (Oxford: 2012). Wirth, Jean. Les marges à drôleries des manuscrits gothiques (Geneva: 2008). Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory (Chicago: 1966). Yates, Frances A. “The Last Laugh,” The New York Review of Books (October 9, 1969). Zaercher, Véronique. Le dialogue rabelaisien: Le Tiers Livre exemplaire, (er) 38 (Geneva: 2000). Zegna-Rata, Olivier. “L’acheminement vers la parole, ou l’éducation de Gargantua,” er 30 (1995): 7–29. Zegura, Elizabeth A. Chesney (ed.). The Rabelais Encyclopedia (Westport, CT, London: 2004). Zegura, Elizabeth A. Chesney. “Toward a Feminist Reading of Rabelais,” jmrs 15.1 (1985): 124–134. Zhiri, Oumelbanine. L’extase et ses paradoxes: Essai sur la structure narrative du Tiers Livre (Paris: 1999). Zhiri, Oumelbanine. “Le Tiers Livre, le temps et le sens,” in Rabelais et la question du sens. Actes du colloque international de Cerisy, août 2000, eds. J. Céard, M.-L. -Launay, and S. Geonget (er) 49 (Geneva: 2011), 161–174. Zumthor, Paul. La lettre et la voix: De la ‘littérature’ médiévale (Paris: 1987). Zumthor, Paul. “L’épiphonème proverbial,” in Rhétorique du proverbe. Revue des sciences humaines 163 (1976): 313–328.

Index of Primary Texts Apian, Pierre 192–195, 192n, 201 Ariosto, Ludovico 178, 178n, 179, 179n, 277, 424, 434, 434n Aristotle 107, 110, 114, 114n, 406, 457n, 462, 462n, 486 Barth, Caspar 547, 547n Boccaccio, Giovanni 169, 169n, 454n Bodin, Jean 107, 107n, 118, 192n, 199 Boétie, Etienne de la 111, 111n Boiardo, Matteo Maria 178, 178n, 179, 179n Bourbon, Nicolas 34, 270n, 282n Bovelles, Charles de 197, 295, 410, 410n Brouault, Jean 373n Budé, Guillaume 25–27, 35, 84, 110, 110n, 121, 123–125, 130, 132, 135, 136, 136n, 141, 143, 210, 253, 253n, 283n, 301, 301n, 410, 410n Calmet, Augustin 171, 171n Calvin, John 32, 34, 45, 85, 88, 270n, 282n, 338–339, 479 Celsus, Aulus C. 61n Chéreau, Ollivier 414n Colonna, Francesco 293n, 294, 347, 431n Coquillart, Guillaume 37, 74, 230, 230n Corrozet, Gilles 206, 206n Cotgrave, Randle 199, 387n, 390n, 392, 516– 518, 517n, 531, 533, 552, 552n, 554, 556 De Lille, Pierre 29, 127, 127n Dolet, Étienne 34, 43, 54–56, 54n, 124, 416, 421 Du Bellay, Guillaume et Jean 26, 30–35, 38– 46, 52–54, 53n, 68, 75, 82, 84, 91–94, 100–105, 108, 123, 129n, 134, 272, 287, 337, 338, 343, 413, 424 Du Bellay, Joachim 15, 15n, 108, 108n, 121, 137, 285, 304, 460, 460n Du Fail, Noël 234, 235n Du Puy-Herbault, Gabriel 338, 412, 412n Erasmus 13, 14, 20, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34, 77, 77n, 79, 80n, 81n, 83, 86–88, 86n, 88n, 90n, 92, 110, 110n, 111, 111n, 121, 123–125, 127, 128, 128n, 134, 143, 144, 147, 147n, 149,

149n, 151, 153–155, 219, 253, 266, 267, 271, 283, 287, 290, 291, 295, 297, 299, 301, 301n, 324n, 334n, 338, 360, 362n, 369n, 370, 398, 409–412, 428, 460, 465, 472n, 481n, 484, 489, 499 Eskrich, Pierre 213, 213n Estienne, Charles 369n, 372, 373 Estienne, Henri 61, 365, 565 Estienne, Robert 45, 550 Fischart, Johann 541–550, 546n, 547n, 552– 556, 554n, 558–563, 565, 568, 569 Folengo, Teofilo 173, 178, 178n, 179, 179n, 180n, 184, 255n, 257, 257n, 258, 262, 277, 405, 434n, 439n, 442 Fuchs, Leonhart 65, 66, 66n, 73 Galen 28, 32, 42, 50, 55–58, 55n, 56n–57n, 60–63, 60n–62n, 67–70, 67n, 68n, 70n, 72, 72n, 74, 127, 129n, 130, 131, 131n, 133, 134, 136, 142, 144, 359, 404 Hesiod 114, 129, 133, 140, 167, 167n, 204, 346, 370, 477n Hippocrates 27, 28, 32, 37, 40, 50, 58, 60–67, 65n, 69–73, 70n, 72n, 73n, 124, 127, 130, 131, 134, 136, 144, 404, 447n Homer 35, 138, 138n, 142n, 167, 167n, 169, 178n, 213, 274, 309, 336, 343, 350, 354 La Croix Du Maine 57, 57n La Vigne, André de 230n, 411, 411n, 532, 532n Le Roy, Antoine 416 Le Testu, Guillaume 188, 188n Lemnius, Levinus 369n Linacre, Thomas 405, 405n Lucian of Samosata 13, 17, 126, 127, 137, 139, 142, 186, 281, 300, 300n, 302, 333, 458 Machiavelli, Niccolo 78, 102, 102n, 103, 103n, 119 Magnus, Olaus 186, 186n, 204, 335 Manardo, Giovanni 32, 58–61, 404 Marot, Clément 16, 16n, 34, 37, 38, 74, 76, 198, 251, 303, 333, 466

617

index of primary texts Ménard, Jean 425, 425n Montaigne, Michel de 147, 151, 207, 207n, 208, 369, 376, 376n, 421, 518n, 545, 546, 550, 563, 564 More, Thomas 113, 119, 147n, 191, 244, 288, 363, 386, 405, 430n Munster, Sebastian 335, 417, 417n, 418, 420, 420n Nanni, Giovanni

181, 407

Ovid 138, 167, 167n, 333, 558 Pagnino, Sante 417, 417n Palsgrave, John 407, 407n Paradin, Guillaume 363n, 420, 420n Paré, Ambroise 69, 69n, 286n Pasquier, Estienne 269, 269n Philippe, Gaspard 116n Poliziano, Angelo 74, 124 Postel, Guillaume 192n, 338, 412, 416, 479

Pulci, Luigi 172, 173n, 174, 174n, 175n, 176n, 177, 177n, 178n, 179, 184, 258, 277 Puy-Herbault, Gabriel du 76n, 338, 412, 412n Richelet, Pierre 415n Ruby, Pechon de 414n Sébillet, Thomas 138, 138n, 217, 323n Seyssel, Claude de 102, 102n, 106, 106n, 107, 107n, 109, 113, 118 Spirito, Lorenzo 394–396, 395n Swift, Jonathan 200, 200n, 524n, 557 Thevet, André 186, 190, 190n, 199n Tiraqueau, André 25, 27, 28, 32, 59, 125, 126, 128, 129, 253, 295, 309, 444n Tory, Geoffroy 142, 230, 295, 411n Trento, Jean-Baptiste 213, 213n Turpin 245, 264n, 277n

Index of Secondary Texts Allen, Valerie 531n Amalfi, Gaetano 565n Angeli, Giovanna 503n Angenot, Marc 432n, 444n, 456n Antonioli, Roland 49n, 51n, 61n, 447n Ard Boone, Rebecca 102n Aronson, Nicole 101n, 107, 107n, 109n, 288, 288n Arsenault, Christine 317n Artal, Susana G. 540n Arveiller, Raymond 410n Auerbach, Erich 200, 269n, 521, 521n, 522, 522n, 523, 523n Bakhtin, Mikhail (see also Bakhtine, Mikhaïl) 8, 9, 9n, 12n, 151, 159, 159n, 160, 163– 166, 223–225, 223n, 256n, 266n, 267, 267n, 268, 268n, 278, 278n, 344, 352, 354, 434n, 441n, 491, 491n, 493, 493n, 518–526, 518n, 519n, 520n, 567 Baldinger, Kurt 296n, 403 Baraz, Michael 294n, 499 Barbe, Jean-Paul 558n Barthes, Roland 461, 469 Bastiaensen, Michael 416n Baudry, Hervé 569n Bauschatz, Cathleen M. 433n, 444n, 445n Bayle, Ariane 18n, 415n Bayless, Martha 524n–526n, 529, 529n Bazola, Jean 433n, 436n Beaujour, Michel 12n Benaïm-Ouaknine, Esther 417n Bermann, Antoine 569n Berriot-Salvadore, Evelyne 432n, 444n Berrong, Richard M. 9, 9n, 160, 160n, 169n, 518n Berry, Alice Fiola 351, 351n, 438n, 447n, 452n Bertalot, Enrico U. 77n Besch, Emile 277n Besson, Paul 546n Bichon, Jean 106n, 108n Blanchard, W. Scott 456n Boisson, Hélène 561n, 562n Boiteux, Martine 417n Bolgar, Robert R. 61n

Bonfil, Roberto 427n Booth, Wayne 434n Bordier, Jean-Pierre 226n Bouchard, Mawy 434n, 442n Bouhaïk-Gironès, Marie 221n, 223n, 234, 236n, 456n, 485n Boulenger, Jacques 128n, 540n, 566 Boulet, Marguerite 119n Bourke, John G. 515n Bourrilly, Victor-Louis 101n, 104n Bowen, Barbara C. 4n, 79n, 94n, 226, 226n, 282n, 353, 353n, 354, 354n, 433n, 437n, 440n, 443n, 469n, 491, 491n, 507, 507n, 523n Boyarin, Daniel 418n Brancher, Dominique 342n Brault, Gérard J. 150, 497, 497n Briand, Michel 479n Briggs, Robin 166n Bromilow, Pollie E. 433n, 440n, 441n Brown, Huntington 540n, 543n Brummack, Jürgen 460n, 472n Brunet, Gustave 560, 560n, 562, 562n Bulang, Tobias 547n Burke, Peter 159n, 518n Butor, Michel 413n Butterworth, Emily 85n Cabantous, Alain 424n Campbell, Catherine E. 237n Campbell, Katia 348n, 416n Capodivacca, Angela Matilde 180n Cappellen, Raphaël 19n, 136n, 295n, 342n, 412n Carron, Jean-Claude 4n, 434n Cave, Terence 10n–13n, 13, 18, 19n, 114n, 138n, 154, 154n, 199n, 274n, 297, 353, 353n, 428n, 441n, 461, 461n, 469n, 487n, 501, 501n, 511 Céard, Jean 9n, 19n, 85n, 86n, 88n, 90n, 160n, 172n, 199n, 202n, 264n, 277, 277n, 281n, 299n, 376n, 392n, 407n, 508n Chambon, Jean-Pierre 230n Charles, Michel 15n Charpentier, Françoise 282n, 354, 354n, 433n

index of secondary texts Chastel, André 189n Chesney, Elizabeth A. (see also Zegura, Elizabeth Chesney) 4n, 434n Chevallier, Raymond 139n Chomarat, Jacques 83n, 144n, 154n Church, William Farr 106n Cifarelli, Paola 421n, 565n Clark, Carol 4n, 523n Clavel, Christophe 349n Clément, Michèle 19n, 149n, 299n, 300n, 414n Clouzot, Henri 237n Cohen, Gustave 222, 222n, 223, 223n, 225 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 160n, 172n Coleman, Dorothy 4n, 458n, 474n Coleman, James A. 4n, 342n Coleman, Paul 552n Colie, Rosalie 481n Colnort-Bodet, Suzanne 374n Conley, Tom 19n, 192, 193, 193n, 215n, 488n Cooper, Richard 20n, 51n, 75n, 91n, 92n, 93n, 96n, 99n, 100n, 101n, 104n, 105n, 133n, 378, 538, 538n, 558n, 559n Cordellier, Dominique 214n Cornilliat, François 15n, 77n, 413n, 483n Courouau, Jean-François 410n Craik, Roger J. 551n, 552n Crescenzo, Richard. 311n Cross, Frank L. 115n Crouzet, Denis 455n D’Aigrefeuille, Charles 217n Dauvois, Nathalie 7n, 342n, 355n Davidson, Israel 417n Davis, Natalie Zemon 226n, 417n Dawson, John L. 372n, 376n, 517, 517n De Bruaene, Anne-Laure 233n De Grève, Marcel 5, 5n, 17n, 76n, 270n, 540n, 551n, 555n, 556n De Smet, Ingrid A.R. 22, 456n De Smet, Rudolf 456n Debaggi Baranova, Tatiana 456n Debailly, Pascal 456n, 457n, 493n Defaux, Gérard 10, 10n, 11n, 12, 12n, 76n, 77n, 80n, 88n, 91n, 105n, 116n, 138n, 145n, 146n, 189, 189n, 204n, 210, 210n, 261n, 273n, 274n, 280, 280n, 288, 289n, 352, 352n, 440n, 441n, 458n, 459, 469n, 496n

619 Deloince-Louette, Christiane 498n Delumeau, Jean 425n Demerson, Guy 1n, 7, 7n, 18n, 138n, 143n, 198, 246n, 248, 248n, 277, 278n, 299n, 305n, 306n, 322, 322n, 353, 353n, 355, 355n, 364n, 369n, 381n, 429n, 434n, 437n, 486n, 540n, 551n, 555n, 557n, 558n, 567n, 569n Demonet, Marie-Luce 7n, 19n, 77n, 111, 111n, 322n, 324n, 348, 348n, 350n, 355n, 433n, 444n, 446n, 447n, 450n, 453n, 461, 461n, 464, 474n, 489n, 497, 497n Denoix, Léon 423n Dentzer, Yvelise 226n Derrett, J. Duncan M. 476n, 508, 508n Desbois-Ientile, Adeline 7n Desrosiers-Bonin, Diane 1n, 70, 70n, 141n, 226n, 281n, 306n, 429n, 431n, 432n, 433n, 440n, 443n, 447n Dewitte, Alfons 544n Dickow, Alexander 498n Dinzelbacher, Peter 166n Dixon, Jack E.G. 372n, 376n, 517, 517n Doiron, Normand 205n Domínguez, Antonio 540n Donaldson-Evans, Lance K. 90n, 477n Dubel, Sandrine 479n Dubois, Claude-Gilbert 163n, 183n, 308n, 407n Duhl, Olga Anna 456n, 472n Dumas, Geneviève 217n Dupèbe, Jean 75n, 85n, 91n Duport, Danièle 372n, 373n Duval, Edwin M. 10, 10n, 11, 11n, 14, 76n, 77, 77n, 96n, 140n, 251, 251n, 264, 265n, 274n, 301n, 303n, 312, 312n, 314n, 319n, 322, 322n, 330, 330n, 331, 331n, 351, 431n, 433n, 434n, 435n, 437n, 438n, 439n, 443n, 445n, 451n, 452n, 453n, 458n, 459, 464n, 478n, 479n, 488n, 489n, 508, 526, 526n, 535n Duval, Sophie 456n Eichel-Lojkine, Patricia 19n, 102n, 277, 278n, 440n, 441n, 451n Eissen, Ariane 479n Elias, Norbert 527n Elliott, Robert C. 462n Elwood, Christopher 537n

620 Enders, Jody 482n Erickson-Bouzrara, Nancy 236n Faber, Frédéric 233, 233n Febvre, Lucien 76, 76n, 78n, 79n, 84n, 353, 353n, 520, 520n Flaubert, Gustave 412, 412n, 559 Fontaine, Marie Madeleine 342n, 357n, 514n Ford, Philip 138n Foucault, Michel 143, 205, 205n, 345n, 473n, 477, 477n Frame, Donald M. 1n, 3, 7, 7n, 16n, 21, 33n, 43n, 147, 243n, 339, 339n, 353, 353n, 361n, 377n, 449n, 509, 533, 557 Françon, Marcel 301n Franklin, Julian H. 115n Freccero, Carla 4n, 431n, 433n, 434n, 436, 436n, 437n, 438n, 442n, 453n Friedman, John Block 172n Fruet, Arlette 205n Gaignebet, Claude 162n, 283n, 335n Ganim, Russell 524n Garçon, Anne-Françoise 372n Garnier-Mathez, Isabelle 526n Gauna, Max 4n, 294n Geirnaert, Dirk 543n, 544n, 545n Gendre, André 16n Genette, Gérard 14n, 297, 297n, 406n Gennep, Arnold van 164, 164n Geonget, Stéphan 7n, 19n, 151n, 294n, 315n, 319n, 474n Germain, Alexandre 217n Giacone, Franco 7n, 18n, 19n, 75n, 355n, 357n, 418n, 489n Gid, Denise 65n Gille, Bertrand 372n Gillet, J.E. 540n Gilman, Peter 160n Gilson, Etienne 8n, 76n, 79n, 143n, 250n, 368n Ginsburg, Léonard 171n Ginzburg, Carlo 167, 167n Giordani, Françoise 366n Glidden, Hope 434n, 435n Glucksmann, André 120, 120n, 294n Gonthier, Nicole 425n Gordon, Richard 55n

index of secondary texts Goumarre, Pierre 447n Gouron, Marcel 50n, 51n Goyet, Francis 163n, 284n, 323n, 499n Gray, Floyd 1n, 4, 4n, 10n, 18n, 274n, 301n, 353, 353n, 441n, 491, 491n, 493, 493n, 497, 497n Greenblatt, Stephen 518n Greene, Thomas 3n, 301n, 306n Greub, Yan 224, 224n Guerrini, Olindo 564n, 565n Guillerm, Luce 444n Guiraud, Pierre 414n Guynn, Noah D. 225n, 533n Halévy, Olivier 7n, 230n, 335n, 355n Hallyn, Fernand 194n Hampton, Timothy 15n Hausmann, Frank-Rutger 95n, 418n, 564 Hayes, Bruce 19n, 225, 225n, 436n, 437n, 482n, 521n Hepp, Noémi 138n Hess, Günter 462n Heulhard, Arthur 56, 56n, 57n, 105n, 117n Higman, Francis M. 76n Hoareau-Dodineau, Jacqueline 425n Hodges, Elisabeth 435n Hoffmann, George 20n, 318n, 507n Hollier, Denis 413n Honoré, Louis 423n Hormaechea, Gabriel 567, 567n Huchon, Mireille 1n, 2n, 7, 7n, 12n, 19n, 20n, 21, 52n, 56n, 59n, 75n, 76n, 80n, 91n, 96, 96n, 97n, 98n, 101n, 104n, 112n, 113, 116n, 118, 119n, 133n, 135n, 143n, 146n, 154, 187n, 189, 195, 198n, 212n, 227, 243n, 250n, 253n, 273n, 275n, 281n, 286n, 288, 290n, 293n, 295n, 296n, 298n, 299n, 303n, 324n, 336, 337, 348, 351, 353, 357n, 358, 374n, 385n, 386n, 399n, 403n, 410n, 430n, 436n, 439n, 444n, 447n, 449n, 453n, 461, 461n, 464n, 465n, 488n, 489n, 514n, 520, 535n, 566 Huizinga, Johan 220, 221n, 273 Huon, Antoinette 140n Iancu, Danièle 427n Inglis, David 524, 524n Iser, Wolfgang 15n

index of secondary texts Jacob, Christian 194n Jacques-Lefèvre, Nicole 166n Jal, Augustin 423n Jansen, Bernhard 551n Jauss, Hans-Robert 15n Jeanneret, Michel 10n, 11n, 12n, 14, 15n, 139n, 274n, 285, 285n, 353, 353n, 372n, 382, 382n, 405n, 492, 492n, 493n, 496n Jochnowitz, George 427n Jordan, Constance 432n, 433n, 444n, 446n, 447n, 448n Jung, Marc-René 163n Kahn, Didier 358n, 373n Kappler, Claude 345, 345n Keller, Abraham C. 160n Kellner, Beate 546n Keohane, Nannerl O. 106n Kessler-Mesguisch, Sophie 409n Kinser, Samuel 4n, 352n, 354, 451n, 483n, 498n, 500n Kleinschmidt, Erich 547n Knecht, Robert J. 109n Koopmans, Jelle 406n, 456n, 485n, 542n, 544n Kotler, Eliane 444n, 446n Kraaijveld, Enny E. 552n, 554n, 555n Krailsheimer, Alban J. 76n, 94n, 354, 354n Kris, Ernst 412n Kritzman, Lawrence 447n Kundera, Milan 120, 120n, 249, 249n, 271, 271n, 492, 492n Kuperty-Tsur, Nadine 261n La Charité, Claude 1n, 2n, 103n, 131n, 134n, 136n, 419n, 458n, 480n La Charité, Raymond C. 4n, 49n La Garanderie, Marie-Madeleine de 141n LaGuardia, David 447n, 449n, 452n Langer, Ullrich 431n, 454n Lauvergnat-Gagnière, Christiane 17n, 127n, 301n, 479n Lavéant, Katell 221n Lavocat, Françoise 237n Lazard, Madeleine 7, 7n, 432n, 458n Le Cadet, Nicolas 7n, 9n, 10n, 15n, 19n, 20n, 76n, 79n, 85n, 141n, 226, 226n, 229n, 237, 237n, 240n, 254n, 335n, 355n, 441n, 442n, 458n, 459

621 Lebègue, Raymond 420n Lecointe, Jean 276n, 415n, 465n, 479n Lefranc, Abel 8, 25, 105n, 132n, 161, 250n, 279, 287, 288n, 300n, 301n, 304n, 352, 352n, 488n, 520, 563 Lemerre, Alphonse 56n Lenient, Charles 456n Léonard, Monique 323n Lestringant, Frank 18n, 97n, 148n, 269n, 278n, 329, 329n, 345, 345n, 352, 352n, 377n, 538n Leushuis, Reinier 432n, 444n, 446n, 447n Leveleux, Corinne 425n Lévi-Strauss, Claude 400n Liaroutzos, Chantal 342n Ligier, Hermann 108n, 113, 113n, 114n Lintner, Dorothée 497, 497n Livingstone, Elizabeth A. 115n Lodge, Anthony 408n Lorblanchet, Hélène 50n Losse, Deborah 4n, 306n, 315n Lote, Georges 102n, 104n, 108n, 112n, 115n, 117n, 288 Lubac, Henri de 79n Lunel, Armand 427n Magdelaine, Caroline 61n, 62n Maillard, Jean-François 539n Major, Adrienne 169, 169n, 170, 170n, 171, 171n Malenfant, Marie-Claude 432n, 444n, 445n, 446n, 447n, 449n Mallary Masters, George 3n, 156, 156n Margolin, Jean-Claude 9n, 155, 155n, 287n, 392n Marichal, Robert 76n, 91n, 95n, 105, 105n, 116n, 117n, 118, 118n, 136n, 288, 423n, 484n, 487n, 563 Marrache-Gouraud, Myriam 7, 7n, 20n, 84n, 89n, 143n, 146n, 262n, 299n, 355, 355n, 430n, 436n, 448n, 495, 540n, 555n, 557n, 558n, 567n, 569n Martin, Daniel 256n Martin, Henry-Jean 399n Martínez, Caridad 566n, 567n Martinez, Marc 456n Masson, Catherine 236n Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle 354n Matoré, Georges 376n

622 Mayer, Claude-Albert 17n, 301n, 305n McDowell, Nicholas 552n McKinley, Mary B. 299n, 444n McPhail, Eric 230n Ménager, Daniel 259n, 305n, 353, 353n, 366n, 420n, 457n, 493n Menini, Romain 2n, 7n, 17n, 19n, 20n, 63n, 281n, 296n, 300n, 334n, 349n, 351, 351n, 382n, 410n, 442n, 444n, 479n Mentzer, Raymond A. 456n Merlin-Kajman, Hélène 461, 461n Mesnard, Jean 89n Michel, Alain 144n Miernowski, Jan 517n, 539n Milhe Poutingon, Gérard 96n, 254n, 263n, 489n Mombello, Gianni 102n Monferran, Jean-Charles 324n Monfort, Marie-Laure 62n Morrison, Susan Signe 523, 524n Moulinas, Robert 427n Mounier, Pascale 19n, 434n Mousnier, Roland 106, 106n Muchembled, Robert 494n Müller, Jan-Dirk 546n Nahon, Peter 427n Nash, Jerry 79n, 495n Naya, Emmanuel 20n Nef, John 372n Neri, Ferdinando 565n Nilles, Camilla 305n Nutton, Vivian 67n Nykrog, Per 294n, 431n, 443n O’Brien, John 4n, 6n Oates, Carolyn F. 166n Ogino, Anna 306n Pagliaroli, Stefano 126n Pasquier, Alain 368n, 369n Paul, Jean 559, 559n, 560, 562n, 566 Pédeflous, Olivier 2n, 19n, 129n, 135n Penham, Daniel Franklin 141n Périgot, Béatrice 434n, 499n Perrat, Charles 103, 103n, 309n Persels, Jeffery C. 524n, 525n, 537n Peureux, Guillaume 539n Pfeffer, Georg 561n, 562n

index of secondary texts Philipot, Emmanuel 222, 222n, 225 Plan, Pierre-Paul 132n, 383n, 386n Plattard, Jean 7n, 53n, 67n, 295n, 301n, 304n, 322n Pleij, Herman 543n Pócs, Eva 166n Polizzi, Gilles 293n, 431n Pons, Emile 408n Porcher, Jean 128n Pouey-Mounou, Anne-Pascale 19n, 305n, 323n, 444n, 446n, 448n, 450n, 461n, 530n, 547n Pouilloux, Jean-Yves 503n Poujol, Jacques 102n, 109n Praeger, David 524, 524n Prescott, Anne Lake 540n, 551n Prevenier, Walter 221n Provenza, Paul 524, 524n Quesnel, Colette 491n Quintero, Ruben 457, 457n Racaut, Luc 456n, 537n Raimondi, Ezio 565n Randall, Michael 106n, 109n, 115n Rawles, Stephen 58n, 272, 273n, 299n, 385n Reeser, Todd W 4, 4n, 10n, 432n, 444n Regan, Shaun 551n, 557n Renner, Bernd 8n, 15n, 19n, 20n, 77n, 81n, 88n, 93n, 140n, 209n, 226, 226n, 263n, 289n, 303n, 305n, 318n, 319n, 353, 353n, 359n, 385, 385n, 425n, 437n, 439n, 446n, 448n, 521n Ricci, Seymour de 63n, 128n Ricœur, Paul 14n, 480, 480n Rieger, Dietmar 547n Rigolot, François 9n, 10n, 11n, 12n, 15n, 17n, 274n, 285, 285n, 289n, 294n, 298n, 300n, 303n, 319n, 353, 353n, 403n, 406n, 434n, 436n, 455n, 464n, 467n, 469n, 488n, 499n, 510n, 519n Roberts, Hugh 539n Robinson, Christopher 334, 334n Roe, Frederick C. 551n, 552n Romier, Lucien 101n, 105n, 116n, 118n Roper, Lyndal 159n Rosier, Laurence 425n Rosolato, Guy 382n Rothstein, Marian 429n, 432n, 433n, 442n

623

index of secondary texts Rousset, Jean 257n Roy, Bruno 216n Russell, Anthony P. 443n Ruymbeke, Bertrand Van 456n Sainéan, Lazare 343n, 424, 424n, 523, 523n, 540n, 546n, 551n, 552n, 556n, 560, 560n, 562, 562n Salmon, John H.M. 115n, 116n Saulnier, Verdun-Léon 88n, 104n, 108, 108n, 151n, 155, 185n, 322n, 351, 352, 352n, 446n, 452n Schiffer, Cathy 447n Schoentjes, Pierre 457n Schübler, Walter 540n Schwartz, Jerome 4n, 274n, 353, 353n, 478n, 498n, 499n, 502n Scollen-Jimack, Christine M. 4n Screech, Michael 1n, 3, 6, 7, 7n, 8n, 10n, 11n, 18n, 21, 58n, 76n, 77n, 79n, 80n, 82n, 83n, 84n, 85n, 87n, 88n, 89n, 90n, 92, 92n, 93n, 95n, 112n, 117n, 138, 138n, 150, 208n, 209n, 212n, 253n, 266n, 274n, 278, 278n, 289n, 292, 292n, 294n, 299, 300n, 350n, 351, 353, 353n, 360n, 385n, 386n, 431n, 432n, 433n, 435n, 441n, 443n, 444n, 445n, 446n, 447n, 458, 458n, 459, 469, 474, 476n, 479n, 484n, 485, 485n, 486n, 487n, 488n, 491n, 492, 492n, 493n, 497n, 508, 510n, 511n, 557 Sicard, Claire 112n Simonin, Michel 2n, 243n Skarup, Povl 335n Sleiderink, Remco 233n Smith, Paul J. 6n, 94n, 96n, 128n, 191n, 228, 228n, 323n, 452n, 483n, 486n, 492n, 540n, 547n, 554n, 555 Smith, Peter J. 524n Smith, William Francis 138n, 557, 562, 563 Sozzi, Lionello 197n, 539n, 566 Spillebout, Gabriel 280, 280n Spitzer, Leo 8, 8n, 9, 12n, 274n, 353, 563 Staples, Amy 434n, 437n, 449n Starobinski, Jean 285n Stephens, Walter E. 4n, 266n, 407n Stewart, Susan 160, 160n, 164, 165n Stone, Donald 519n Sturel, René 60, 61n

Telle, Emile V. 87n, 425n Tetel, Marcel 479n, 515, 515n, 516, 516n, 518, 519, 520, 524, 540, 540n, 564n, 565n Thijssen-Schoute, C. Louise 554n Thomine, Marie-Claire 19n, 299n Tin, Louis-Georges 322n, 405n Tinguely, Frédéric 15n, 266n Tomarken, Annette 481n Tomasik, Timothy 15n, 343n Torrance, Robert 493n Tournon, André 18, 18n, 77n, 90n, 151n, 250n, 255n, 259, 259n, 294n, 322n, 348, 348n, 410n, 429n, 433n, 437n, 444, 444n, 446n, 447n, 448n, 449n, 453n, 474n, 477, 477n Trtnik-Rossettini, Olga 456n Ugarte-Ballester, Xus 567n, 568n Ullmann, Walter 107n Upham, Alfred Horatio 551n Van Kampen, Herman 543n Vega, Julián Bravo 567n Venard, Marc 421n, 422n Vigliano, Tristan 1n, 9n, 15n, 84n, 445n, 452n Vignes, Jean 7n, 355n Viguier, Marie-Claire 427n Vitullo, Juliann 15n Wajeman, Lise 539n Walker, Carolyn Bynum 172n Wanegffelen, Thierry 353, 353n Weinberg, Florence 94n, 278, 278n, 284n, 353, 354, 354n, 368n, 433n, 450n, 546n Weinbrot, Howard 456n Werle, Dirk 547n Whibley, Charles 551n Williams, Wes 353, 353n Wirth, Jean 412n Yates, Frances A. 201n, 519, 520n Zaercher, Véronique 86n, 302n, 445n Zegna-Rata, Olivier 286n Zhiri, Oumelbanine 19n, 90n, 445n, 474n, 477n, 478n, 498n Zumthor, Paul 227, 228, 228n, 415n