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Francois Rabelais
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Francois Rabelais
born c. 1494, Poitou, France
died probably April 9, 1553, Paris
pseudonym Alcofribas NasierFrench writer and priest who for
his contemporaries wasan eminent physician and humanist and
for posterity is the author of the comic masterpiece
Gargantua and Pantagruel . The four novels composing
this work are outstanding for their rich use of Renaissance
French and for their comedy, which ranges from gross
burlesque to profound satire. They exploit popular legends,
farces, and romances, as well as classical and Italian
material, but were written primarily for a court public and
a learned one. The adjective Rabelaisian applied to
scatological humour is misleading; Rabelais used scatology
aesthetically, not gratuitously, for comic condemnation. His
creative exuberance, colourful and wide-ranging vocabulary,
and literary variety continue to ensure his popularity.
Life.
Details of Rabelais's life are sparse and difficult to
interpret. He was the son of Antoine Rabelais, a rich
Touraine landowner and a prominent lawyer who deputized for
the lieutenant-général of Poitou in 1527. After
apparentlystudying law, Rabelais became a Franciscan novice
at La Baumette (1510?) and later moved to the Puy-Saint-Martin
convent at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou. By 1521 (perhaps
earlier) he had taken holy orders.
Rabelais early acquired a reputation for profound humanist
learning among his contemporaries, but the elements of
religious satire and scatological humour in his comic novels
eventually left him open to persecution. He depended
throughout his life on powerful political figures (Guillaume
du Bellay, Margaret of Navarre) and on high-ranking liberal
ecclesiastics (Cardinal Jean du Bellay, Bishop Geoffroy
d'Estissac, Cardinal Odet de Chatillon) for protection in
thosedangerous and intolerant times in France.
Rabelais was closely associated with Pierre Amy, a liberal
Franciscan humanist of international repute. In 1524 the
Greek books of both scholars were temporarily confiscated by
superiors of their convent, because Greek was suspect to
hyperorthodox Roman Catholics as a “heretical” language that
opened up the original New Testament to study. Rabelais then
obtained a temporary dispensation from Pope Clement VII and
was removed to the Benedictine houseof Saint-Pierre-de-Maillezais,
the prior of which was his bishop, Geoffroy d'Estissac. He
never liked his new order, however, and he later satirized
the Benedictines, although he passed lightly over Franciscan
shortcomings.
Rabelais studied medicine, probably under the aegis of the
Benedictines in their Hôtel Saint-Denis in Paris. In 1530 he
broke his vows and left the Benedictines to study medicine
at the University of Montpellier, probably with the support
of his patron, Geoffroy d'Estissac. Graduating within weeks,
he lectured on the works of distinguished ancient Greek
physicians and published his own editions of Hippocrates'
Aphorisms and Galen's Ars parva (“The Art of Raising
Children”) in 1532. As a doctor he placed great reliance on
classical authority, siding with the Platonic school of
Hippocrates but also following Galen and Avicenna. During
this period an unknown widow bore him two children (François
and Junie), who were given their father's name and were
legitimated by Pope Paul IV in 1540.
After practicing medicine briefly in Narbonne, Rabelais was
appointed physician to the hospital of Lyon, the Hôtel-Dieu,
in 1532. In the same year, he edited the medical letters of
Giovanni Manardi, a contemporary Italian physician. It was
during this period that he discovered his true talent. Fired
by the success of an anonymous popular chapbook, Les Grandes
et inestimables cronicques du grant et énorme géant
Gargantua, he published his first novel, Les horribles et
épouvantables faits et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel,
roy des Dipsodes (1532; “The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds
and Words of the Renowned Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes”),
under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (an obvious anagram of
his real name). Pantagruel is slighter in length and
intellectual depth than his later novels,but nothing of this
quality had been seen before in French in any similar genre.
Rabelais displayed his delight in words, his profound sense
of the comedy of language itself, his mastery of comic
situation, monologue, dialogue, and action,and his genius as
a storyteller who was able to create a worldof fantasy out
of words alone. Within the framework of a mock-heroic,
chivalrous romance, he laughed at many types of sophistry,
including legal obscurantism and hermeticism, which he
nevertheless preferred to the scholasticism of the Sorbonne.
One chapter stands out for its sustained seriousness,
praising the divine gift of fertile matrimony as
acompensation for death caused by Adam's fall. Pantagruel
borrows openly from Sir Thomas More's Utopia in its
reference to the war between Pantagruel's country, Utopia,
and the Dipsodes, but it also preaches a semi-Lutheran
doctrine—that no one but God and his angels may spread
thegospel by force. Pantagruel is memorable as the book in
which Pantagruel's companion, Panurge, a cunning and witty
rogue, first appears.
Though condemned by the Sorbonne in Paris as obscene,
Pantagruel was a popular success. It was followed in 1533
bythe Pantagrueline Prognostication, a parody of the
almanacs, astrological predictions that exercised a growing
hold on the Renaissance mind. In 1534 Rabelais left the
Hôtel-Dieu to travel to Rome with the bishop of Paris, Jean
duBellay. He returned to Lyon in May of that year and
publishedan edition of Bartolomeo Marliani's description of
Rome, Topographia antiquae Romae. He returned to the
Hôtel-Dieubut left it again in February 1535, upon which the
authorities of the Lyon hospital appointed someone else to
his post.
La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua (“The Inestimable Life
of the Great Gargantua”) belongs to this period. The second
edition is dated 1535; the first edition was probably
published in 1534, though it lacks the title page in the
only known copy. In Gargantua Rabelais continues to exploit
medieval romances mock-heroically, telling of the birth,
education, and prowesses of the giant Gargantua, who is
Pantagruel's father. Much of the satire—for example, mockery
of the ignorant trivialization of the mystical cult of
emblems and of erroneous theories of heraldry—is calculated
to delight the court; much also aims at delighting the
learned reader—for example, Rabelais sides with humanist
lawyers against legal traditionalists and doctors who
accepted 11-month, or even 13-month, pregnancies.
Old-fashioned scholastic pedagogy is ridiculed and
contrasted with the humanist ideal of the Christian prince,
widely learned in art, science, and crafts and skilled in
knightly warfare. The war between Gargantua and his
neighbour, the “biliously choleric” Picrochole, is partly a
private satire of an enemy of Rabelais's father and partly a
mocking of Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, and the
imperial design of world conquest. Gargantua commands
themilitary operations, but some of the exploits are carried
out by Frère Jean (the Benedictine). Though he is lean,
lecherous,dirty, and ignorant, Frère Jean is redeemed by his
jollity and active virtue; for his fellow monks are timorous
and idle, delighting in “vain repetitions” of prayers.
Gargantua's last major episode centres on the erection of
the Abbey of Thélème, a monastic institution that rejects
poverty, celibacy, and obedience; instead it welcomes wealth
and the well-born, praises the aristocratic life, and
rejoices in good marriages.
After Gargantua, Rabelais published nothing new for 11
years, though he prudently expurgated his two works of
overbold religious opinions. He continued as physician to
Jean du Bellay, who had become a cardinal, and his powerful
brother Guillaume, and in 1535 Rabelais accompanied the
cardinal to Rome. There he regularized his position by
making a “supplication” to the pope for his “apostasy”
(i.e., his unauthorized departure from the Benedictine
monastery); the pope issued a bull freeing Rabelais from
ecclesiastical censure and allowing him to reenter the
Benedictine order. Rabelais then arranged to enter the
Benedictine convent at Saint-Maur-les-Fossés, where Cardinal
Jean du Bellay was abbot. The convent was secularized six
months later, and Rabelais became a secular priest,
authorized to exercise his medical profession.
In May 1537 Rabelais was awarded the doctorate of medicine
of Montpellier; and he delivered, with considerable success,
a course of lectures on Hippocrates' Prognostics. Hewas at
Aigues-Mortes in July 1538 when Charles V met the French
king Francis I, but his movements are obscure until
hefollowed Guillaume du Bellay to the Piedmont in 1542.
Guillaume died in January 1543, and to Rabelais his death
meant the loss of an important patron. That same year
Geoffroy d'Estissac died as well, and Rabelais's novels were
condemned by the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris.
Rabelais sought protection from the French king's sister
Margaret, queen of Navarre, dedicating to her the third book
of the Gargantua-Pantagruel series, Tiers livre des faitset
dits heroiques du noble Pantagruel (1546; “Third Book of the
Heroic Deeds and Words of the Noble Pantagruel”). Despite
its royal privilege (i.e., license to print), the book
wasimmediately condemned for heresy by the Sorbonne, and
Rabelais fled to Metz (an imperial city), remaining there
until 1547.
The Tiers livre is Rabelais's most profound work.
Pantagruelhas now deepened into a Stoico-Christian inerrant
sage; Panurge, a lover of self and deluded by the devil, is
now an adept at making black seem white. Panurge hesitates:
Should he marry? Will he be cuckolded, beaten, robbed by
hiswife? He consults numerous prognostications, both good
Platonic ones and less reputable ones—all to no effect
because of his self-love. He consults a good theologian, a
Platonic doctor, and a Skeptic philosopher approved of by
the learned giants, but his problem is not treated by the
judge Bridoye, who—like Roman law in cases of extreme
perplexity—trusts in Providence and decides cases by casting
lots. Panurge trusts in no one, least of all in himself.
Itis therefore decided to consult the oracle of the Dive
Bouteille (“Sacred Bottle”), and the travelers set out for
the temple. The Tiers livre ends enigmatically with a mock
eulogy in which hemp is praised for its myriad uses.
From 1547 onward, Rabelais found protection again as
physician to Cardinal Jean du Bellay and accompanied him
toRome via Turin, Ferrara, and Bologna. Passing through
Lyon, he gave his printer his incomplete Quart livre
(“Fourth Book”), which, as printed in 1548, finishes in the
middle of a sentence but contains some of his most
delightful comic storytelling. In Rome Rabelais sent a story
to his newest protector in the Guise family, Charles of
Lorraine, 2nd Cardinal de Lorraine; the story described the
“Sciomachie” (“Simulated Battle”) organized by Cardinal Jean
to celebrate the birth of Louis of Orléans, second son of
Henry II of France.
In January 1551 the Cardinal de Guise presented him with two
benefices at Meudon and Jambet, though Rabelais never
officiated or resided there. In 1552, through the influence
of the cardinal, Rabelais was able to publish—with a new
prologue—the full Quart livre des faits etdits héroïques du
noble Pantagruel (“Fourth Book of the Heroic Deeds and Words
of the Noble Pantagruel”), his longest book. Despite its
royal privilège, this work, too, was condemned by the
Sorbonne and banned by Parlement, but Rabelais's powerful
patrons soon had the censorship lifted. In 1553 Rabelais
resigned his benefices. He died shortly thereafter and was
buried in Saint-Paul-des-Champs, Paris.
In 1562 there appeared in Lyon the Isle sonante, allegedly
by Rabelais. It was expanded in 1564 into the so-called
Cinquiesme et dernier livre (“Fifth and Last Book”). This
workis partly satirical, partly an allegory; the Sacred
Bottle—the ostensible quest of the Quart livre—is consulted,
and the heroes receive the oraculous advice: “drink”
(symbolizing wisdom?). This work cannot be by Rabelais as it
stands. Some scholars believe it to be based on his (lost)
drafts, while others deny it any authenticity whatsoever.
Gargantua and Pantagruel
Rabelais's purpose in the four books of his masterpiece
wasto entertain the cultivated reader at the expense of the
follies and exaggerations of his times. If he points
lessons, it is because his life has taught him something
about the evils of comatose monasticism, the trickery of
lawyers, the pigheaded persistence of litigants, and the
ignorance of grasping physicians. Rabelais was a friar with
unhappy memories of his monastery; his father had wasted his
moneyon lengthy litigation with a neighbour over some
trivial waterrights; and he himself was earning his living
by medicine in an age when the distinction between physician
and quack was needle-fine. Though it is an entertainment,
therefore, Gargantua and Pantagruel is also serious. Its
principal narrative is devoted to a voyage of discovery that
parodies the travelers' tales current in Rabelais's day.
Rabelais begins lightheartedly; his travelers merely set out
to discover whether Panurge will be cuckolded if he marries.
A dozen oracles have already hinted at Panurge's inevitable
fate, yet each time he has reasoned their verdict away; and
the voyage itself provides a number of amusing incidents.
Yet, like Don Quixote's, it is a fundamentally serious quest
directed toward a true goal, the discovery of the secret of
life.
Intoxication—with life, with learning, with the use and
abuse of words—is the prevailing mood of the book. Rabelais
himself provides the model of the exuberant creator. His
four books provide a cunning mosaic of scholarly, literary,
and scientific parody. One finds this in its simplest form
in the catalog of the library of St. Victor, in the list of
preposterous substantives or attributes in which Rabelais
delights, and in the inquiry by means of Virgilian lots into
thequestion of Panurge's eventual cuckoldom. But at other
times the humour is more complicated and works on several
levels. Gargantua's campaign against King Picrochole (book
1), for instance, contains personal, historical, moral, and
classical points closely interwoven. The battles are fought
inRabelais's home country, in which each hamlet is
magnifiedinto a fortified city. Moreover, they also refer to
the feud between Rabelais the elder and his neighbour. They
also comment on recent historical events involving France
and the Holy Roman Empire, however, and can even be read as
propaganda against war, or at least in favour of the more
humane conduct of hostilities. On yet another level,
Rabelais's account of this imaginary warfare can be taken as
mockery of the classical historians: Gargantua's speech to
his defeated enemy (book 1, chapter 50) echoes one put into
the mouth of the Roman emperor Trajan by Pliny the Younger.
Despite these complex levels of reference, Rabelais was not
a self-conscious writer; he made his book out of the
disorderly contents of his mind. As a result it is
ill-constructed, and the same thoughts are repeated in
Gargantua that he had already set down in Pantagruel; the
nature of an ideal education, for example, is examined in
both books. Moreover, the main action of the story, which
arises from the question of Panurge's intended marriage,
only begins in the third book. The first, Gargantua, throws
up the enormous contradiction that has made the
interpretationof Rabelais's own intellectual standpoint
almost impossible. On the one hand we have the rumbustious
festivities that celebrate the giant's peculiarly miraculous
birth and the “Rabelaisian” account of his childish habits;
and on the other a plea for an enlightened education. Again,
the brutal slaughter of the Picrocholine wars, in which
Rabelais obviously delights, is followed by the utopian
description of Thélème, the Renaissance ideal of a civilized
community. Pantagruel follows the same pattern with
variations, introducing Panurge but omitting Frère Jean, and
putting Pantagruel in the place of his father, Gargantua. In
fact the characters are not strongly individualized. They
exist only in what they say, being so many voices through
whom the author speaks. Panurge, for instance, has no
consistent nature. A resourceful and intelligent poor
scholar in Pantagruel, he becomes a credulous buffoon in the
third book and an arrant coward in the fourth.
The third and fourth books pursue the story of the inquiry
andvoyage, and in them Rabelais's invention is at its
height. The first two books contain incidents close in
feeling to the medieval fabliaux, but the third and fourth
books are rich in anew, learned humour. Rabelais was a
writer molded by one tradition, the medieval Roman Catholic,
whose sympathies lay to a greater extent with another, the
Renaissance or classical. Yet when he writes in praise of
the new humanist ideals—in the chapters on education, on the
foundation of Thélème, or in praise of drinking from the
“sacred bottle” of learning or enlightenment—he easily
becomes sententious. His head is for the new learning, while
his flesh and heart belong to the old. It is in his absurd,
earthy, and exuberant inventions, which are medieval in
spirit even when they mock at medieval acceptances, that
Rabelais is a great, entertaining, and worldly wise writer.
M.A. Screech
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Gargantua and
Pantagruel
Francois
Rabelais
1494 -1553
The history of the modern novel begins with Rabelais. Allowing
for some of the minor precedents which he subjected to pastiche,
Rabelais'Pantagruei, published under his acronymic pseudonym
Alcofribas Nasier, established a whole new genre of writing with
a riotous mix of rhetorical energy, linguistic humor, and
learned wit. In creating a comedy of sensory excesses, playing
off various licentious, boozy, and lusty appetites, Rabelais
also prefigures much in the history of the novel from Don
Quixote to Ulysses. Perhaps his greatest achievement is his
free-spirited ness, which combines high-jinking vulgar
materialism with a profound, skeptical mode of humanist wit.
The novel itself tells the story of the gigantic Gargantua and
his son Pantagruel. The first book details fantastic incidents
in the early years of Pantagruel and his roguish companion
Panurge.The second book, Gargantua, tracks back in time to the
genealogy of Pantagruel's father, while making scholasticism and
old-fashioned educational methods the object of satire. The
third book develops as a satire of intellectual learning mainly
through the heroic deeds and sayings of Pantagruel. In the
fourth book, Pantagruel and Panurge head off on a voyage to the
Oracle of the Holy Bottle in Cathay, which provides scenes for
satire on religious excess. The fifth and most bitter book,
takes them to the temple of the Holy Bottle where they follow
the oracle's advice to "Drink!" The inconsequential plot hardly
rises to the level of picaresque, but there is a feast of mirth
in the telling.Thomas Urquhart's seventeenth-century translation
of the first three books is a marvel in its own right, and
preferable in many ways to twentieth-century attempts to
translate the spirit of Rabelaisian rhetoric.
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GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL
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Type of work: Mock-heroic chronicle
Author: Francois Rabelais (c. 1494-1553)
Type of plot: Burlesque romance
Time of plot: Renaissance
Locale: France
First published: Gargantua et Pantagruel, 1567 (first complete
edition): Gargantua, 1534 (English translation,
1653); Pantagruel, 1532 (English translation, 1653); Tiers Livre, 1546
(Third Book, 1693); Le Quart Livre, 1552
(Fourth Book, 1694); Le Cinquiesme Livre, 1564 (Fifth Book, 1694)
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Gargantua and Pantagruel is a vast mock-heroic panorama about an
amiable dynasty of giants who are prodigious eaters and drinkers, gay
and earthy. Discursive and monumental, the work demonstrates the theme
that the real purpose of life is to expand the soul by exploring the
sources of varied experience.
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Principal Characters
Gargantua, an affable prince, a giant—as an infant over 2,000 ells of
cloth are required to clothe him—who has many adventures. He travels
over Europe and other parts of the world fighting wars from which all
prisoners are set free, straightening out disputes in other kingdoms,
and helping his friends achieve their goals.
PantagrueJ, Gargantua's giant son, who once got an arm out of his
swaddling clothes and ate the cow that was nursing him. Pantagruel was
born when his father was 400 years old. Accepting with good nature the
responsibility of aiding the oppressed, he spends a good deal of his
time traveling the earth with his companion Panurge. In their travels
they visit a land where all citizens have noses shaped like the ace of
clubs and a country in which the people eat and drink nothing but air.
Panurge, a beggar and Pantagruel's companion, who knows sixty-three ways
to make money and two hundred fourteen ways to spend it. He speaks
twelve known and unknown languages, but he does not know whether he
should marry. Finally, he decides to consult the Oracle of the Holy
Bottle to find the answer to his question. The trip to the island of the
Holy Bottle is filled with adventures for Panurge and Pantagruel. The
Oracle, when finally consulted, utters one word, "trine." Panurge takes
this pronouncement, translated as "drink," to mean that he should marry.
Friar John of the Funnels, a lecherous, lusty monk who fights well for
Gargantua when the latter finds himself at war with King Picrochole of
Lerne. To reward the friar for his gallantry, Gargantua orders workers
to build the Abbey of Theleme, which has been Friar John's dream. Here
men and women live together and work to accumulate wealth.
Grandgousier, the giant king who is Gargantua's father.
Gargamelle, Gargantua's mother who, taken suddenly in labor, bears
Gargantua from her left ear.
Picrochole, King of Lerne, who invades Grandgou-sier's country. His army
is repulsed by Gargantua, with the aid of Friar John and other loyal
helpers. The prisoners captured are all allowed to go free.
Anarchus, King of Dipsody, who invades the land of the Amaurots. His
army is overcome by Pantagruel, who makes the King a crier of green
sauce.
Bacbuc, the priestess who conducts Panurge to the Oracle of the Holy
Bottle and translates the Oracle's message for him.
Holofernes and Joberlin Bride, Gargantua's first teachers.
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The Story
Grandgousier and Gargamelle were expecting a child. During the eleventh
month of her pregnancy, Gargamelle ate too many tripes and then played
tag on the green. That afternoon in a green meadow, Gargantua was born
from his mother's left ear.
Gargantua was a prodigy, and with his first breath, he began to clamor
for drink. Seventeen thousand nine hundred and thirteen cows were needed
to supply him with milk. For his clothing, the tailors used nine hundred
ells of linen to make his shirt and eleven hundred and five ells of
white broadcloth to make his breeches. Eleven hundred cowhides were used
for the soles of his shoes. At first Gargantua's education was in the
hands of two masters of the old school, Holofernes and Joberlin Bride.
When Grandgousier observed that his son was making no progress, however,
he sent him to Paris to study with Ponocrates. Aside from some mishaps,
as when he took the bells from the tower of Notre Dame to tie around his
horse's neck, Gargantua did much better with his studies in Paris.
Back home a dispute arose. The bakers ofLerne refused to sell cakes to
the shepherds of Grandgousier. In the quarrel, a shepherd felled a
baker, and King Picrochole of Lerne invaded the country. Grandgousier
baked cartloads of cakes to appease Picrochole but to no avail, for no
one dared oppose Picrochole except doughty Friar John of the Funnels.
Finally, Grandgousier asked Gargantua to come to his aid.
Gargantua fought valiantly. Cannonballs seemed to him as grape seeds,
and when he combed his hair, cannon-balls dropped out. After he had
conquered the army of Lerne, he generously set all the prisoners free.
All of his helpers were rewarded well, but for Friar John. Gargantua
built the famous Abbey of Theleme, where men and women could be
together, could leave when they wished, and where marriage and the
accumulation of wealth were encouraged.
When he was more than four hundred years old, Gargantua had a son,
Pantagruel. A remarkable baby, Pan-tagruel was hairy as a bear at birth
and of such great size that he cost the life of his mother. Gargantua
was sorely vexed between weeping for his wife and rejoicing for his son.
Pantagruel required the services of four thousand six hundred cows to
nurse him. Once he got an arm out of his swaddling clothes and, grasping
the cow nursing him, he ate the cow. Afterward, Pantagruel's arms were
bound with anchor ropes. One day, the women forgot to clean his face
after nursing, and a bear came and licked the drops of milk from the
baby's face. By a great effort, Pantagruel broke the ropes and ate the
bear. In despair, Gargantua bound his son with four great chains, one of
which was later used to bind Lucifer when he had the colic. Pantagruel,
however, broke the five-foot beam that constituted the footboard of his
cradle and ran around with the cradle on his back.
Pantagruel showed great promise as a scholar. After a period of
wandering, he settled down in Paris. There he was frequently called on
to settle disputes between learned lawyers. One day he met a ragged
young beggar. On speaking to him, Pantagruel received answers in twelve
known and unknown tongues. Greatly taken by this fluent beggar.
Pantagruel and Panurge became great friends. Panurge was a merry fellow
who knew sixty-three ways to make money and two hundred fourteen ways to
spend it.
Pantagruel learned that the Dipsodes had invaded the land of the
Amaurots. Stirred by this danger to Utopia, he set out by ship to do
battle. By trickery and courage, Pantagruel overcame the wicked giants.
He married their king, Anarchus. to an old lantern-carrying hag and made
the king a crier of green sauce. Now that the land of Dipsody had been
conquered, Pantagruel transported a colony of Utopians there numbering
9,876,543,210 men, besides many women and children. All of these people
were very fertile. Every nine months, each married woman bore seven
children. In a short time, Dipsody was populated by virtuous Utopians.
For his services and friendship, Panurge was made Laird of Salmigondin.
The revenue from this lairdship amounted to 6,789,106,789 gold royals a
year, but Pan-urge managed to spend his income well in advance. Then,
intending to settle down, Panurge began to reflect seriously on
marriage, and he consulted his lord Pantagruel. They came to no
conclusion in the matter because they got into an argument about the
virtues of borrowing and lending money. Nevertheless, the flea in his
ear kept reminding Panurge of his contemplated marriage, and he set off
to seek other counsel.
Panurge consulted the Sibyl of Panzoult, the poet Ram-inagrobis, Herr
Tripa, and Friar John. When all the advice he received proved
contradictory, Panurge prevailed on Pantagruel and Friar John to set out
with him to consult the Oracle of the Holy Bottle. From Saint Malo. the
party sailed in twelve ships for the Holy Bottle, located in Upper
India. The Portuguese sometimes took three years for that voyage, but
Pantagruel and Panurge cut that time to one month by sailing across the
Frozen Sea north of Canada.
The valiant company had many adventures on the way. On the Island of the
Ennasins, they found a race of people with noses shaped like the ace of
clubs. The people who lived on the Island of Ruach ate and drank nothing
but wind. At the Ringing Islands, they found a strange race of Siticines
who had long ago turned into birds. On Condemnation Island, they fell
into the power of Gripe-men-all, Archduke of the Furred Law-cats, and
Panurge was forced to solve a riddle before the travelers were given
their freedom.
At last they came to the island of the Holy Bottle. Guided by a Lantern
from Lanternland. they came to a large vineyard planted by Bacchus
himself. Then they went underground through a plastered vault and came
to marble steps. Down they went, a hundred steps or more. Panurge was
greatly afraid, but Friar John took him by the collar and heartened him.
At the bottom they came to a great mosaic floor on which was shown the
history of Bacchus. Finally they were met by the priestess Bac-buc, who
was to conduct them to the Bottle. Panurge knelt to kiss the rim of the
fountain. Bacbuc threw something into the well, and the water began to
boil. When Panurge sang the prescribed ritual, the Oracle of the Holy
Bottle pronounced the word "trine." Bacbuc looked up the word in a huge
silver book. It meant drink, a word declared to be the most gracious and
intelligible she had ever heard from the Holy Bottle. Panurge took the
word as a sanction for his marriage.
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Critical Evaluation
Partly because France's greatest comic prose writer was a legend even in
his own lifetime, most of the facts of Francois Rabelais' life remains
hazy. A monk, doctor of medicine, and writer, Rabelais transferred from
the Franciscan to the Benedictine order with the Pope's express
permission, because the latter order was both more tolerant and more
scholarly. The year 1532 found him in Lyons, at that time the
intellectual center of France, where he published his first creative
work, book 2 (Pantagruel). As a satirist and humanist, Rabelais labored
between the two religious extremes of Roman Catholicism and Genevan
Protestantism; he had the mixed blessings of being attacked, alike, by
Scaliger, St. Francis de Sales, and Calvin. All of them warned against
his heretical impiety; he was, first and last, an iconoclast. Yet, like
Erasmus, he attempted to steer a middle course—the attitude that led
Thomas More to his death in the same period. This may have made Rabelais
unpopular with his more radical contemporaries, such as Martin Luther
and Ignatius Loyola; but it also made him one one of the most durable
and most human comic writers of this century—and of all time.
In Rabelais, the spirit of comedy blends with the spirit of epic to
produce a novel work without parallel or close precedent. The chronicles
are universally inclusive, expressing the Renaissance ambition to
explore and chart all realms of human experience and thought; and the
mood of the narrator matches the scope of the narration. Rabelais, as
Alcofibras, attributes his infinite exuberance to his literal and
symbolic inebriation, which he invites his readers to share. His
curiosity, realism, joy, and unpredictability are all things to all
men—as long as the reader, whoever he may be, is willing to be
intoxicated by a distillation of strong wit and language. As a genre,
the chronicles may be compared to the "institute" so popular during the
Renaissance (such as Niccolo Machia-velli's The Prince, 1532, Baldassare
Castiglione's The Courtier, 1528, Roger Ascham's The Schoolmaster,
1570); they have also been considered a parody of medieval adventure
romances. In the end, however, Rabelais' work beggars generic typology.
Its narrative includes history, fable, myth, drama, lyric, comedy,
burlesque, novel, and epic; just as its sources include sculpture,
jurisprudence, pedagogy, architecture, painting, medicine, physics,
mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, theology, religion, music,
aeronautics, agriculture, botany, athletics, and psychological
counseling. All of these elements are thrown together, with
characteristic flair and mad abandon, into a savory stew.
It is a consistency of flavor, of authorial mood, that holds together
this diverse and variegated work. That flavor is not one of thought, for
Rabelais is no great thinker. As his translator Jacques LeClerq says,
"his ideas are primitive, fundamental and eternal in their simplicity."
The unifying idea is the philosophy of Pantagruel-ism: "Do As Thou
Wilt." The world of Pantagruel is a world in which no restrictions on
sensual or intellectual exploration can be tolerated; excessive
discipline is regarded as evil and inhuman. In true epicurean fashion,
Rabelais has no patience for inhibitions; man lives for too brief a time
to allow himself the luxury of denial. The Abbey of Theleme is the
thematic center of the work, with its credo that instinct forms the only
valid basis for morality and social structure. Rabelais ignores the
dangers of the anarchy this credo implies; he is talking about the mind,
not the body politic. The dullest thing imaginable is the unimaginative,
conforming mind. His satirical pen is lifted against all who affect
freedom of any kind in any fashion: against the hypocrites, militarists,
abusers of justice, pedants, and medieval scholastics.
The reader of these gigantic chronicles, then, must not expect a plot.
Anything so regular is anathema to Pan-tagruelism. Readers should also
realize that the characters themselves are not the focus of the author's
art but are, in fact, largely indistinguishable from one another. One of
the most amusing elements of the book is that they are also
indistinguishably large; Pantagruel's mouth, described in book 2,
chapter 32, one of the finest chapters in European literature, is. at
times, large enough to contain kingdoms and mountain ranges, at other
times, no larger than a dovecote. The exception is Panurge. the
normal-size man. He is an unforgettable character who makes so strong an
impression, even on the author, that he cannot be forgotten. The third,
fourth, and fifth books, in fact, are based on his adventures—just as
Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor to exploit the beloved
character of Falstaff. Panurge is the heroic companion of Pantagruel, in
the best epic tradition; he also has the cunning of Ulysses, the drunken
mirth of Falstaff, the roguishness of Jack Wilton and Tyl Ulenspiegel
(his numerous pockets filled with innumerable tricks), the cynical but
lighthearted opportunism of Chaucer's Pardoner, the magic powers of
Shakespeare's Puck or Ariel. He is the wise fool of Erasmus and King
Lear, and a Socratic gadfly who bursts the pretensions and illusions of
all he encounters. The chapter entitled "How Panurge Non-plussed the
Englishman Who Argued by Signs" is a literary tour de force,
concentrating into one vivid, raucous chapter the comic spirit forever
to be known as Rabelaisian. Important in other ways are "How Pantagruel
Met a Limousin Who Spoke Spurious French," for its attack on unfounded
affectation; and Gargantua's letter to Pantagruel, expressing the entire
range of Renaissance learning, juxtaposed with the chapter introducing
Panurge, who personifies Renaissance wit.
Rabelais' chaotically inventive style, filled with puns, wordplays, and
synonyms, as well as with neologisms of his own creation, makes him one
of the most difficult of all writers to translate accurately. His
language reflects the rich variety of sixteenth century France, and he
was to first to observe invariable rules in the writing of French
prose—called, by Pasquier, "the father of our idiom." His syntax is
flexible, supple, expansive, sparkling with vitality and the harmony of
an ebullient character, complex and original. Rabelais did for
French vocabulary what Chaucer did for English, fortifying it with
eclectically selected terms of the soil, mill, tavern, and market, as
well as scholarly terms and phrases gleaned from nearly all languages.
As his comic theme reflects the universal as well as the particular,
Rabelais' language combines the provincial with the popular—in a stew
fit for the mouths of giants. A gargantuan appetite has nothing to do
with gluttony.
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