There is more in the marrow of these books, Rabelais explained, than readers might expect. “Following the dog’s example, you will have to be wise in sniffing, smelling, and estimating these fine and meaty books, swiftness in the chase and boldness in the attack are what is called for; after which, by careful reading and frequent meditation, you should break the bone and suck the substantific marrow … in the certain hope that you will be rendered prudent and valorous by such a reading.” The title pages of both volumes bore the anagram Maistre Alcofribas (Nasier), “Abstractor of Quintessence.”
But footnotes are seldom required for Gargantua’s young life. “This infant did not, as soon as he was born, begin to cry ‘Mie, mie’ like other children; but in a loud voice, he bawled ‘Give me a drink! a drink! a drink!’ as though he were inviting the whole world to have a drink with him, and so lustily that he was heard through the land of Booze and Bibbers.” Gargantua’s codpiece, the flap in the front of his trousers, took sixteen and a quarter ells of cloth “in the form of a buttress, securely and jovially fastened with a pair of pretty gold buckles” and two enameled hooks each enchased with a huge emerald the size of an orange. “For (as Orpheus says, lib. De Lapidibus, and Pliny, lib. ult.) this stone has an erective virtue and one very comforting to the natural member. The bulge of the codpiece was nearly six feet long.”
Gargantua so impresses his father, Grandgousier, when, as a boy, he invents an ingenious Rump-Wiper that Grandgousier gives the boy a proper education and one day has him made a Doctor of Jovial Science. When Gargantua arrives in Paris to be educated at the university, he finds the people “so stupid, such ninnies, and so foolish by nature that a juggler, a pardon-peddler, or relict-seller, a mule with bells, or a fiddler in the middle of a public square will gather a bigger crowd than a good evangelic preacher ever could.” To escape the gaping crowd Gargantua takes refuge in the towers of Notre-Dame. From there he proclaims in a loud voice, “I suppose these rascals expect me to pay my own welcome and proficiat, do they? That’s fair enough. I’m going to give them a vintage par rys—of a kind to make you laugh.” Then he unbuttons his handsome codpiece and “he drenched them with such a bitter deluge of urine that he thereby drowned two-hundred-sixty-thousand-four-hundred-eighteen, not counting the women and little children. A certain number escaped this doughty pisser by lightness of foot; and these, when they had reached a point above the University, sweating, coughing, spitting, and out of breath, all began cursing and swearing, some in wrath while others were laughing fit to burst.…” These people, “done for from laughing,” decided to name their city Paris (from par rys, “laughing”). “Up to that time it had been called Leutitia, as Strabo tells us, lib. iii, that is to say, White in Greek, on account of the white rumps of the ladies there.” Attracted by the melodious bells in the towers of Notre-Dame, Gargantua takes them as jingle bells for the neck of the mare he is sending back to his father loaded with Brie cheese and fresh herring.
In Paris he suffers the scholastic discipline of the great doctor, Tubal Holofernes, who, after five years and three months, teaches him to recite his letters backward and to write the Gothic script so he can copy numerous books, “for the art of printing was not yet practised.” Then he spends more than ten years and eleven months on the standard Latin grammar “with the commentaries of Bang-breeze, Scallywag, Claptrap, Gualehaul, John the Calf, Copper-coin, Flowery-tongue, and a number of others,” which he recited in reverse order to prove to his mother that grammar was no science at all. His next tutor, Ponocrates, follows the humanistic mode of education, introduces him to learned men of lively minds, directs his interests to nature, while inducting him into the mathematical sciences, geometry, astronomy, and music and encouraging him to hunt and swim to keep fit—so that now he does not lose a single hour of the day. Meanwhile Gargantua has learned to play 217 different games (all listed), some of Rabelais’s own invention.
In a sudden change of scene we are plunged into the Cake Peddlers’ War. As the cake peddlers of Lerne pass along the highway they are approached by shepherds who simply want to buy their cakes. But the cake peddlers turn on them, calling them “scum of the earth, toothless bastards, redheaded rogues, chippy-chasers, filthy wretches of the kind that dung in the bed, big lubbers, sneaky curs, lazy hounds, pretty boys, pot-bellies, windjammers, good-for-nothings, clodhoppers, bad customers, greedy beggars, blowhards, mamma’s darlings, monkey-faces, loafers, bums, big boobs, scoundrels, simpletons, silly jokers, dudes, teeth-chattering gramps, dirty cowherds, and dung-dripping shepherds” who ought to be satisfied with coarse lumpy bread and big round loaves.
This occasions a grand melee, out of which grows a murderous war. The episode caricatures the interminable quarrel of Rabelais’s own lawyer father with neighbors over the fishing rights in a stream. Here Rabelais introduces one of his most attractive inventions, the good-natured monk Frère Jean, whose deeds of valor defend the local shepherds against the aggressive King Picrochole of the Cake Peddlers. Gargantua finally rewards Frère Jean by building him a new kind of monastery (or anti-monastery), the proverbial Abbey of Thélème, ruled by the motto “Do what you will.” Inhabited only by handsome men and women richly “dressed according to their own fancy,” it becomes an epicure’s utopia. Members of the order speak a half-dozen languages, play musical instruments, and write verses to one another—the girls by the age of ten, the boys by twelve.
Pantagruel’s adventures in Book Two, written sometime before Book One, are disjointed and delightfully random. Pantagruel’s youth, like that of his father, is filled by noble deeds. In Paris for his education he meets his lifelong companion Panurge. Gargantua pleads for Renaissance learning in a letter to his son. And Pantagruel shrewdly settles a legal quibble between Lord Kissarse and Monsieur Suckpoop by theological hairsplitting debated in sign-language. Then Pantagruel and Panurge are off to the war in Utopia, which was being laid waste by the Dipsodes. When their friend Epistemon is decapitated, Panurge holds the head against his codpiece, “to keep it warm, as well as to keep it out of the draught.” Then with fifteen or sixteen stitches he reattaches Epistemon’s head. “Epistemon was healed, and very cleverly, too, except that he was hoarse for more than three weeks afterward, and had a hacking cough, which he could only get rid of by drinking a lot.” Meanwhile, Epistemon has been dead long enough to have some wonderful adventures in hell and the Elysian Fields. There Alexander the Great earns a miserable living patching old shoes, and Xerxes hawks mustard. “All the Knights of the Round Table were poor day-laborers, plying an oar on the rivers Cocytus, Phlegethon, Styx, Acheron, and Lethe.… But for each fare, all they get is a punch in the nose, and at night, a little piece of moldy bread.” Needless to say, Pantagruel and Panurge win the war.
When we read Rabelais in translation, we are grasping for his wit through a veil. Rabelais’s book was an act of faith in a language he was beginning to make literary. Chateaubriand would say that Rabelais “created French literature.” His respected medical works he had written in Latin, but he chose to write his novel in French. Spoken literature and the arts of memory were still only partly displaced by the printed word. Francis I, Rabelais himself reported, had Rabelais’s book read aloud to him. Not till 1539 did French become the language of the law courts. Calvin translated his own Institutes of the Christian Religion from Latin into French in 1541. When Joachim du Bellay wrote the manifesto of the new French literature, his Defence and Illustration of the French Language (1549), Rabelais was one of the few French men of learning who had dared write books in the language of the marketplace.
Luxuriating in the vulgar tongue, Rabelais makes his book a showcase for its fresh eloquence. Exploiting the exclamations, hyperboles, and obscenities of the marketplace, he never uses one word when twenty would possibly come to mind. Even through English translations like those of J. M. Cohen and Samuel Putnam, we can still see Rabelais wallowing in the vernacular. Now that printing presses reached an ever-widening market of the newly literate, the F
rench language offered the novel incentives of money and celebrity. Gargantua and Pantagruel displays the ebullience of a language newly liberated from the academy, and Rabelais himself is drunk on words. We can imagine that he might have swallowed a French dictionary—if one had been available at the time. But Robert Estienne’s pioneer Latin-French dictionary did not appear until 1538.
In 1546, twelve years after Gargantua, when Rabelais produced his Third Book, orthodoxy had become more fervent. Only the year before, Waldensian heretics had been massacred in southeastern France, and in Paris that same year Rabelais’s friend Dolet was burned at the stake for heresy. This Third Book, a sequel to the narrative of Pantagruel, is the first to bear Rabelais’s name as author and “doctor of medicine.” It is more serious than its predecessors, in a Rabelaisian way. Dedicated to a friend of literature, Margaret Queen of Navarre, sister of Francis I, it rambles around “The Woman Question” (La Querelle des Femmes), then widely agitated by learned men. Panurge, deciding to marry, consults with theologians, philosophers, lawyers, doctors, and miscellaneous divines and diviners. Rabelais precipitately brings Gargantua all the way back from the afterlife to harangue his son Pantagruel on the importance of parental consent to marriage. But the pope had held that parental consent was not required because the sacrament of marriage performed by a priest was enough to join the parties in the eyes of God. Still, Rabelais, along with Erasmus, the Evangelicals, and the Protestants, found the need for parental consent in the Old Testament and feared the pope’s monopoly over a realm that God had assigned to father and mother. For aristocrats and propertied people in those days marriage was more a political and commercial than an amorous alliance. Fortune-hunters or romantics could and often did abscond with well-endowed daughters to the ruin of the family estates. Yet the collusion of a priest (as in Romeo’s case, with unfortunate consequences) did not prevent noble families from using the law of rape against a suitor who married without parental consent. While Rabelais lets us share Panurge’s pains of indecision, we hear on all sides that cuckoldry is the only certainty in marriage.
When Pantagruel asks Panurge when he is going to get out of debt, Panurge shrewdly replies:
I’m a creator, you say, and of what? Why, look at all those nice, charming little creditors! For creditors are indeed—and I’ll stick to it through hell-fire—nice and charming creatures.…
Don’t you think I feel good, when, every morning, I see around me those same creditors, and all of them so humble, so ready to serve me, and so full of bowings and scrapings? And when I note how, upon my showing a little better face to one than to the others, the old bastard thinks he’s going to have his settlement first.… These are my office-seekers, my hangers-on, my bowers, my greeters, my constant petitioners.
(Translated by Samuel Putnam)
With his genius for seeing the other side, Rabelais reports Judge Bridlegoose’s simple procedure for deciding law cases by casting dice. The only trouble is that with advancing age the judge cannot make out the score on the dice. But why, if he can no longer read, does he still require parties to submit so many documents? First, for the sake of formality “without which whatever is done is of no value,” and also because preparing and handling the papers provides “a dignified and salutary form of exercise.” Finally, the slow procedure allows a wholesome interval of time before the case is decided. “If judgement were given when the case was raw, unripe, and in its early stages, there would be a danger of the same trouble as physicians say follows on the lancing of an abcess before it is ripe, or the purging of some harmful humour from the body before it has fully matured.… Furthermore, Nature instructs us to pick and eat fruit when they are ripe … likewise to marry our daughters when they are nubile.”
Rabelais’s Third Book, written as a sequel to Pantagruel, had received the royal privilege, but neither this nor his dedication had saved it from suppression by the Sorbonne. They found no explicit heresy, but still his irreverent puns on “soul” and “ars-oul” irritated them. Now he explains, in his dedication of the Fourth Book to Cardinal Odet de Chatillon, that “the slanders of certain cannibals, misanthropes, and agelasts” had tried his patience and almost decided him “not to write another iota.” It may have seemed to his credit that he was attacked by Calvin in 1550. His new patron, the cardinal, renewed the royal privilege for all his works.
This Fourth Book (1548; enlarged, 1552), the longest and the least incoherent of all, delightfully embroiders the tales of the search for a Northwest Passage then fascinating Western Europe. Rabelais may have known Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), explorer of Canada and “discoverer” of the St. Lawrence River, from whom he borrowed the outline of Pantagruel’s voyage, still an adventure in dipsomania. On this journey to the Oracle of the Divine Bottle, the Holy Bacbuc (from Hebrew for bottle), we rediscover Pantagruelism, “a certain gaiety of spirit pickled in disdain of fortuitous things.” On the high seas, on strange islands, and in exotic ports he meets Windmill-Swallowers, Spouting Whales, Ruachs (who live on wind), Serpentine Chitterlings, Popefigs, Papimaniacs, Gastrolators, and Rodilardus the large cat whom he took for a Devil. The land was so frigid that even words were frozen:
“Here, here,” exclaimed Pantagruel, “here are some that are not yet thawed.”
Then he threw on the deck before us whole handfuls of frozen words, which looked like crystallized sweets of different colours. We saw some words gules, or gay quips, some vert, some azure, some sable, and some or. When we warmed them a little between our hands they melted like snow, and we actually heard them, though we did not understand them, for they were in a barbarous language. There was one exception, however, a fairly big one. This, when Friar John picked it up, made a noise like a chestnut that had been thrown on the embers without being pricked. It was an explosion and made us all start with fear. “That,” said Friar John, “was a cannon shot in its day.”
Panurge asked Pantagruel to give him some more. But Pantagruel answered that only lovers give their words.
(Translated by J. M. Cohen)
The so-called Fifth Book, which was not printed until 1562, nine years after Rabelais’s death, is not generally accepted as the work of Rabelais. But it does have some authentic Rabelaisian turns, like the Furred Cats, who cause all the world’s evils. The oracle Bacbuc now firmly revises Aristotle: “Not laughing, but drinking is the proper role of man.” The shibboleth “Drink!” takes on new meaning when she explains that when a certain Jewish captain of old was leading his people across the desert “he received manna out of the skies, which to their imagination tasted exactly as food had tasted in the past. Similarly here, as you drink of this miraculous liquor you will detect the taste of whatever wine you may imagine.” It was an age when each Renaissance scholar, blessed by new thirsts for ancient liquor, was finding something to his own taste.
Just as Rabelais’s Fourth Book appeared, the French king Henry II was in his most anti-Roman mood, issuing new edicts against papistical abuses. And Rabelais was called a pliant royal propagandist for his gibes at Popejiggers and Papimaniacs. Unfortunately in April of that very year when King Henry II made up his differences with the pope, ridicule of Rome was suddenly not only unstylish but life-risking. The magistrate who sniffed the shift in royal doctrine and banned Rabelais’s book on March 1, 1552, was none other than an old friend and the ally of his youth, fellow pioneer of humanism, André Tiraqueau (1480–1558). Rabelais must have found it hard to whet his thirst for laughter. We know nothing for sure about how Rabelais’s life ended in 1553. There were stories of his death in prison, and various reports of his last words. The most appealing were noted by his inventive English translator Pierre Motteux (c.1663–1718). “I am going to seek a grand perhaps; draw the curtain, the farce is played.”
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Adventures in Madness
CERVANTES’S Don Quixote, sometimes called the first modern novel, was born as a kind of anti-novel. Beginning as the tale of an “ingenious gentleman of La Mancha” whose
mind had been unbalanced by reading too many books of chivalry, Don Quixote soon became a nickname for anyone inspired by lofty but unrealizable ideals. The self-educated son of an impoverished apothecary-surgeon, Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) would embroider the disparity between illusion and reality. With personal experience more of “reverses than of verses” he sought in words a reward that he had earned but never received in the world. An expert on poverty, Cervantes cheerily concluded that “the best sauce in the world is hunger, and as the poor are never without it, they always eat with relish.” One of seven children, he was born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, a small town then the site of one of Spain’s great universities. His father, an itinerant, impecunious médico cirujano (apothecary and paramedic), was imprisoned for debt at least once before he moved his family to Madrid, still only a large village (it became Philip II’s capital in 1561). Miguel’s father, Roderigo, had tried unsuccessfully to avoid imprisonment on the grounds of his family’s status as hidalgos. We know little else of Cervantes’s first twenty-one years. He probably never attended a university, but loved to read anything he could find. In the household of a Spanish cardinal in Rome he came to know Italian life and letters.
All his adult life Cervantes bore the mark of his courage in the quixotic effort of his age—to defend the faith against the Turkish-Muslim hordes. Christian forces, split every which way by theological quibbles and dynastic rivalries, somehow managed for a time to unite against the menace. At Lepanto, at the western end of the Gulf of Corinth on October 5, 1571, the Christian allies, 208 galleys, and numerous smaller vessels with thirty thousand men fought a four-hour battle against the inferior Ottoman fleet. By nightfall the allies had won a decisive victory. Cervantes later recalled that “there were fifteen thousand Christians, all at the oar in the Turkish fleet, who regained their longed-for liberty that day.”
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 41
