Translation dependence is, of course, a common characteristic of everyone’s access to most of world literature. No single individual can be expected to read The Tale of Genji, The Bhagavadghita, The Oresteia, Mrs. Dalloway, Salammbô, The Dream of the Red Chamber, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and Gilgamesh, to take a few random examples, all in the original. There is, however, a striking difference between reading a translation of Genji and reading a translation of Rabelais. It is not just that we need a translation of Rabelais’s text, but that the text itself depicts a world in which an irreducible variety of languages and dialects—real or imaginary, rustic or polished, fully understood, half-understood, misinterpreted, not understood at all, or inherently incomprehensible—are constantly rubbing up against each other. It is not insignificant that one of the two very first people Pantagruel encounters (in chapter 9 of Pantagruel) when he arrives in Paris is Panurge, who greets him in thirteen different languages, some of which Pantagruel not only does not understand, but cannot even securely identify (unsurprisingly, given that some of them are imaginary languages), but who then turns out to be a native of Touraine. So even if someone addresses you in Dutch, Spanish, or Danish, or all of them successively, you cannot exclude the possibility that he is actually a landsmann from the very same region of France from which you hail. Pantagruel’s second encounter (in chapter 6 of Pantagruel) is with a student who originally speaks to him in a bizarre and barely comprehensible, because hyper-latinate, “French” but eventually lapses into the almost equally obscure patois of his native Limousin. Even if one encounters a “known” language one cannot be sure it will be spoken in anything like its “standard” or “pure” form. In fact the idea of a “standard French” did not exist in the sixteenth century, and this episode might be thought to throw some doubt on the credibility of the whole idea of a “pure” idiom, except to the extent to which this is an artificial sociological construct that is externally imposed on people. “French” in some sense derives from Latin, but adding ever more Latin does not result in a “purer” French; rather, it produces something neither fish nor fowl and easily comprehended by no one.
Language itself is a central concern of Pantagruel and the successor volumes. It is an important fact about our world that different languages exist and that interpreting them is an unavoidable, ceaseless, and difficult task. That our need for translations is universal and that any translation is uncertain and potentially fallacious may seem rather trivial claims, but much of Western literature presents action in a world that is resolutely monoglottal. In the Aeneid, how are Dido and Aeneas represented as conversing? Surely Dido would speak Punic to her sister in book 4, lines 416ff., just as, presumably, Aeneas tells his story in books 2 and 3 in (some dialect of Mycenaean?) Greek, yet Dido’s speech to Anna and her monologue intérieur in book 4, lines 534ff. are given in the same flawless Latin as Aeneas’s tale. For Vergil, speculations about how Dido and Aeneas spoke to each other are as pointless as asking how many children Lady Macbeth had or whether Mrs. Dalloway could speak Italian. For the purposes of the Aeneid, the realities of variation between languages do not matter. Vergil’s Latin is to stand as the fully transparent medium for presenting what Dido and Aeneas are conceived to have “really said and thought.”
Issues of translation and “interpretation” were especially pressing in a society like that of sixteenth-century France, which was deeply informed by a “religion of a book.” For a long time, the text of The Book had been effectively beyond question: It was the so-called Vulgate, a standardized edition of the Old and New Testaments in Latin produced in the fourth century AD. By Rabelais’s time, “Vulgate” had become a misnomer, because although Latin could have been construed, at least notionally, as the “common tongue” of everyday speech (sermo uulgatus) in the West when this translation was originally made, by the sixteenth century this was no longer true. Yet the ipssisima uerba (the very words themselves) of this text had acquired a veneer of sanctity through long use, and the Catholic Church clung to it tenaciously.
In the sixteenth century, the standing of the Vulgate came under pressure from two sides. If, it was argued, the Vulgate had come into existence as scripture in the then common everyday language of the times, why not do the same for the sixteenth century, when Latin had ceased to be the language of everyday speech, and translate scripture into the various vernaculars? If so, who had the authority and power to say whether or not the translation was “correct”? Given the role of appeals to the scripture in all domains of life, the power to certify a translation or a set of interpretative notes, or (in some cases) to punish those who produced unauthorized or deviant versions was power indeed, and so, understandably enough, the Catholic Church wished to reserve it for itself. The Church hierarchy was hostile to any project of translating scripture into a vernacular. That was one side of the story: the issue of turning the Christian scriptures into the vernaculars (or not). The other side of the story was that the Vulgate was itself a translation of an original, so why use it as a basis for a rendering of the scriptures into the vernaculars (if one decided to do this)? Why not go back to the Greek originals? What then if it turned out that the Vulgate was mistaken in its rendering of the Greek? Or that the Vulgate reading was only one of a number of different possible translations? Suppose that the Greek text itself turned out not to be self-evidently inviolate and uncorrupted, but to exist in different versions that exhibited variations, so that an editorial decision needed to be made about which of these variants to accept? Given the extent to which certain important doctrinal and organizational issues might be seen to depend on accepting the reading of the Vulgate as the definitive one, one can easily see how even studying Greek—an activity to which Rabelais devoted much time and energy—could come to be seen as a potentially subversive act.
In this highly charged atmosphere where power and authority, religion, politics, and issues of translation and interpretation were deeply intertwined, one can see how the pressure to take a position on hermeneutics and to join one party or another became intense. The “wrong” decision could cause you to end up knifed in the gutter or shackled to the stake awaiting combustion, and there was no safe, recognized, “neutral” position one could adopt hors de la mêlée. Even to suggest that such a position was possible was itself to make a highly inflammatory contribution to the struggle, because it could be taken to mean that ideological squabbles either did not matter or could not be settled. Those who were perfectly prepared to exterminate their doctrinal opponents physically would not take kindly to the suggestion that their differences did not matter or were not decidable. Under the circumstances, it is small wonder that language and its proper interpretation loomed so large for Rabelais.
The plurality of human languages, the potential opacity of specifically verbal behavior, and the need for, but uncertainty of, translation and interpretation are merely further instances of a more general phenomenon that is connected with all forms of signification. Verbal signs—language—are not the only forms of meaningfulness, nor the only kind of signs that require “interpretation,” and Rabelais explicitly recognizes this. After all, the long chapter 13 of Pantagruel is devoted to the description of a debate that is conducted silently, entirely through gestures, and another chapter of Gargantua treats the “language” of colors. Finally, in the Tiers livre even the lolling of a fool’s head can be taken as a sign that is to be interpreted as a clue to how one should act and what the future will hold. The realm of that which requires interpretation is much wider than “language” (in the sense in which we call “Danish” one language and “Greek” another). There is a continuity between trying to make sense of what the speaker of Dutch is saying, knowing what the use of a certain color means, and “reading” the world of signs around us so as to know how to act in it.
That the difficulty here is an omnipresent one becomes especially clear in the Tiers livre, where Panurge is trying to get practical advice about whether or not he should marry. This book
illustrates the un-feasibility of getting a useful, authoritative answer to questions like this from any external sources because of the impossibility of interpreting any of the proposed answers in a way that is unequivocal. Pantagruel and his friends exhaust all the means at their disposal—sortition, consultation with oracles, interpretation of dreams, advice from purported experts (lawyers, theologians, medical doctors, philosophers)—but to no effect. Panurge is left at the end of the book as confused as he was at the beginning. It is not, that is, that any of the oracles they consult simply fails to respond—as happened at the end of the ancient world when the oracles simply stopped operating. Nor is it that anyone raises any particular questions about the authority of the method used, as would increasingly be the case in the period after Descartes, but it is simply that no one can decide what the response has actually been, that is, what exactly it means.
The answers that Panurge gets in response to the question about his marriage fall into three broad categories. First, there are “responses” that are radical non-answers. We are presented with experts who respond with completely irrelevant remarks; deaf-mutes who produce physical gestures that seem to be responses, but the point and meaning of which is anyone’s guess; and philosophers who talk around the question in an even more than usually pointless way without coming to any determinate conclusion at all. Second, there are forms of divination that may seem prima facie to give a clear answer, but turn out on investigation to be deeply ambiguous and admit of widely divergent and even contradictory readings. The sortes Vergilianae operated by opening a copy of Vergil and picking a verse at random. Any given verse by Vergil chosen as a source of advice can be read, however, as it turns out, one way, or another way, often in completely contradictory ways, as chapter 10 of the Tiers livre shows with particular clarity.
The third kind of advice to Panurge is given (twice) by Pantagruel, first when in chapter 10 of the Tiers livre he asks rhetorically whether Pantagruel does not know his own will, with the implication that knowing his own will would give him the solution to his difficulty. Panurge’s problem, however, is not lack of self-knowledge (in anything like the everyday sense of that term). When Pantagruel asks him whether he doesn’t know what he wants, the answer to that is that he knows very well what he wants: to get married while knowing for certain that he will not be cuckolded. This is on the face of it an odd question in the context of a “serious” concern with the grounds and authority of “knowledge,” although it is one of the standard themes of some early modern comedy (in Molière, for instance). Rabelais characteristically blends the comic and the serious. At the level of the “serious” Panurge knows perfectly well that there is something wrong with this volitional state—the certainty he wants is not available. If he did not know this he would not be tormented. So the real problem is generated not by Panurge’s desire to marry, but by his pathological fear of being cuckolded. In chapter 29 of the Tiers livre Pantagruel states that he stands by the advice he has already given to Panurge, which he now formulates as “every man must be the arbiter of his own thoughts and seek counsel in himself,” and attributes Panurge’s problem to his amour de soi. His desire to have a wife while retaining a certain conception of himself (as a non-cuckold) clouds his judgment and blinds him so much that it skews his reading of what the authorities and oracles tell him. So the question shifts from “Should Panurge marry?” to “Can Panurge get a grip on himself and change his state of will, realizing he cannot have certainty about the future and relaxing about it?”
We are left at the end of the Tiers livre in a peculiar situation that will be very uncomfortable for a certain kind of mind. It is hard to read the Tiers livre through without forming the opinion that in fact all the sources of advice consulted, to the extent to which they give any advice at all, say the same thing: namely, that Panurge is fated to be cuckolded. Rabelais goes out of his way to show how Panurge can, and does, take the relevant passages in exactly the opposite way, as recommendations to marry and predictions that his wife will be faithful, loving, and hard-working. Yet it is not at all clear that there is, or could be, a systematic way of proving that Panurge’s reading is wrong.
The search for clear, distinct, authoritative answers to questions about how we humans should act is unending. The need for action often imposes on us a binary structure (you either move out of the path of the oncoming lorry or you don’t), although human thought is not always organized in this binary way. Given the overwhelming and primary importance of action for humans, though, binary distinctions are salient in all societies. Divisio is a fundamental phenomenon. All known human societies make some kind of distinction between what may and what may not be said, shown, or done in what context. We call some of these distinctions those between “the forbidden” and “the permitted,” “the sacred” and “the profane,” “the taboo” and “the utilitarian,” “the decent” and “the indecent,” “the polite” and “the rude,” and this crude list does not in any way exhaust human inventiveness. Individual human societies differ from each other in the nature, importance, and function of divisio along a number of dimensions.
Since speaking, writing, and publishing are all actions, some categories of the permitted and the forbidden can naturally apply to literature, too. A poem, play, or novel can be judged decent or indecent; in some countries blasphemy is a crime, that is, subject to potential coercive intervention. In Rabelais’s own lifetime the Sorbonne had his books banned, and when, after his death, the Vatican started printing a formal Index librorum prohibitorum in 1559, all of his works found a place on it, although we do not know whether this was because they were thought specifically to promote licentiousness, because of some perceived doctrinal deviation, or simply because they exuded an air of unspecified, but general, indecency.
From the idea that there are standards for what may and what may not be published it is but a short step to the idea that there are proper internal standards of appropriateness for particular literary genres. This idea is especially strong in the aesthetic theorizing that was dominant in antiquity, and it became exceedingly influential again when resurrected by “humanist” writers of the Renaissance. Rabelais was in many ways a full-blown and enthusiastic member of the humanist movement. At considerable personal cost, he had himself acquired a firm knowledge of ancient Greek and did extensive reading in “classical” Greco-Roman literature, and he was an avowed admirer of the prince of humanists, Erasmus, whom he addresses in an elegantly turned Latin letter, shot through with phrases in Greek, as “pater mi humanissime” (my most humane father, perhaps with the further connotation: my father, you who are the greatest of the humanists).
“Renaissance humanism” was as complex and internally differentiated a phenomenon as any of the major intellectual and cultural movements in the West. As the name indicates, one of the central ideas was the (re)orientation and refocusing of cultural and spiritual life on “man.” The humanists found, primarily in Cicero, what they took to be the irresistibly attractive ideal of the homo humanus. One can think of this ideal as constituted by three positive elements, which are designated by the three Greek words to metron, paideia, and philanthropia. To metron, “the measure(d),” indicates that humans should in the first place live by an ethic of moderation, rejecting excess of any kind and not aspiring to the impossible. Thus Pindar writes: “Do not, my soul, strive for eternal life, but exhaust the means at your disposal,” and the odes of Horace are a nearly inexhaustible source of admonitions to aurea mediocritas (the golden mean). Moderation applies also to cognitive claims. People should limit what they claim to “know” to what they—and any human—can clearly and certainly see and understand. Thus, torturing people is clearly a direct visible evil, and one should not embark on it on the basis of opaque, uncertain, or highly controversial religious doctrines. Aesthetically, this implies a preference for what is surveyable by the human senses and well-proportioned, which means commensurate with those human forms of sensation and perception.
As important as these positive ideals are, the features of their world from which the humanists recoiled in horror are at least as important in understanding them. They summed up these negative ideals by calling them “barbarous,” “Gothic,” or (eventually) “medieval.” The Gothic world was one of obscurantism; immoderate, overheated fantasies; and superstitions—one in which people spoke a language full of plebeian usages, grammatical solecisms, and unheard-of neologisms, and indulged in pointless scholastic logic-chopping. Gothic art was in general disproportioned and misshapen, and in it natural forms were grotesquely distorted.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 10
