A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  For a work that is rumored to be loose as a noodle, Gargantua moves immediately to make significant allusions. The first is to Plato’s Symposium and the speech of Alcibiades in praise of his mentor, Socrates, whom he compares to an apothecary’s box that is adorned with improbable figures, from harpies and satyrs to flying goats and saddled ducks, each image designed to provoke mirth, yet a box whose interior is as precious as a casket of the Magi, full of … well, among our several renderers, there is some difference. Thomas Urquhart, the earliest and most esteemed translator (1653), offers “balm, ambergreese, amomon, musk, civet, with several kinds of precious stones, and other things of great price,” and our aforesaid Andrew Brown follows suit, overall more obedient to the text, while Penguin Classic’s J. M. Cohen replaces “precious stones” with “mineral essences,” perhaps an improvement; however, Jacques LeClercq (whose version [1936] spoke so persuasively to me when I was a tad because it was the translation in the Modern Library, the first library I knew) is expansive and explanatory, with “balsam of Mecca, ambergris from the sperm whale, amomum from the cardmon, musk from the deer and civet from the civet’s arsehole—not to mention various sorts of precious stones, used for medical purposes, and other invaluable possessions.”

  Rabelais does that to you. He fills you with wind. You outgrow several sizes. Words multiply in your mind immediately, the way ants invade a larder, soon more plentiful than the grounds that were spilled on the kitchen counter while making morning coffee. In Gargantua’s day, they were revered, despised, traded, banned, liberated, loved. At the wine-soaked tables of the inns, one exchanged views, lies, brags and other tales; in the markets, bargaining went on in a dialect as local and delicious as their greens; in the doss-houses, grunts were gratefully given and received; at church, the air was Latinated and, like the light, stained its priestly columns, brightened its aisles or occluded niches, and lengthened even the grief in kneeling figures. Most of all, there were old animosities and new views, among them the sight of the Greek language, to which aspiring humanists paid a visit as though the script were sea-girt Greece itself—books that the Church confiscated and held incommunicado to prevent the spread of error among the learned. A few of these fresh readers of Greek were those who felt they had been given two new languages: their earthy everyday tongue (in this case, French, often seen for the first time in printed books) as well as the works of the great pagan philosophers and the New Testament itself, where creation began with the logos just as it seemed to be beginning for them; and even though the world was everywhere widening to reveal fresh continents to be discovered and despoiled, heathen souls to be sought out and saved, nevertheless ordinary life was the richest land so far claimed for any kingdom, because along with common things came their common names, and with the names came common knowledge: mud puddle, haymow, oxen, minnow, lettuce, fart, smirk, seaport, wink.

  (François Rabelais paid homage to three tongues when he Latinized his French name to inscribe it in his books, and followed that with an accompanying phrase in Greek—“François Rabelais’ Book and His Friends”—assigning ownership to himself in Latin and borrower’s rights to his close associates in Greek, a generosity necessary to the spread of knowledge when books were rare, and, since they were so rare, a generosity indeed. The elaborateness of his signature was matched by the general shape of his hand, which affected the scrolls and parasitic letters of the legal profession his father practiced, and was symbolic of a writing style, some thought, that fastened afterthoughts to every final flourish.)

  Books were rare and books were revered. The opened cover was compared to the opened eye, to a chest of treasure, a doorway to the divine, the cork in a bottle; however, books bore error on through time as well as truth, opinion, hypothesis, and conjecture, and they could fuddle the mind as well as wine. Mistakes, fakes, and falsehoods, in an opportune place, can become history, as the many mistranslations camped out on sacred tomes attest. Alcibiades did not compare Socrates to an apothecary’s box, but to those “Silenus-figures that sit in the statuaries’ shops … when the two halves are disjoined, they are seen to possess statues of gods within” (215a6–b4, Stanley Rosen’s version, Plato’s Symposium, 2d ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). The actual reference is no less suitable to Rabelais’s purposes than the mistaken one, yet about it the translators gather, honor-bound to preserve and repeat it.

  And if we broke free of words to inspect the philosopher in person, as if that were possible, we would still have a book bag for a head, eyes colored by custom, commonplace, and superstition. He would not “look” wise, as if we knew what wisdom wore to appear stupid—furrowed brow or quizzical smile, bald because his head steamed. “… you would not have given the peel of an onion for him,” Urquhart says; you’d not have offered “an onion skin,” declares LeClercq; not “the top of an onion,” Powys puts it; nary “a shred of an onion for him,” Cohen has it; or “you wouldn’t have given the shred of an onion skin,” in Brown’s opinion, accepting most that has come before but declining the tuffet; while Rabelais, if we want to bother with the source, wrote, “… n’en eussiez donne un coupeau d’oignon,” not realizing that coupeau would become obsolete and that his metaphor would therefore be lost: “… you would not give the hilltop of an onion for him.”

  This is a minor matter indeed, but it is interesting to note that Powys (Rabelais. London: Bodley Head, 1948), who creeps closest to his quarry, has complained of Samuel Putnam, whose translation he praises and many favor, for ruthlessly updating the text, thus making it more readable for his generation while depriving Rabelais’s own time its age and voice. I might add: and some of his art.

  Who cares whether Grandgousier, or Great Gullet, was a rollicking blade and a superlative toper, as one translator describes him; or—since there is no reference to anyone’s gullet in the passage I’m looking at—was just a good fellow in his time, and notable jester, according to another; or, as Andrew Brown describes him for us, was instead “a real barrel of laughs”? Brown also advises us to “check out” texts and “knock back” drinks, as we are wont now to do. He makes us feel comfortable in the Renaissance, as if it were putting on its show in our living room. Certainly, Brown’s version is more zippy and even more accurate than many. Picky points perhaps. But imagine these modest disagreements multiplied through five volumes and 100,000 times.

  In his lively introduction to Pantagruel, Andrew Brown points out, apropos the same contrast between Socrates the Silenus and Socrates the Sage that opens the work, that interpretation, in Rabelais’s day, was a dangerous undertaking, as much for what you might be thought to be learning as for what you actually did; but because he is translating a later version of the text, one that Rabelais judged to be more prudent to publish than the original, there are bits, offensive to Church authorities, omitted.

  Jean Plattard (The Life of François Rabelais. London: Cass & Co., 1930) thinks that Rabelais was born around 1494 on his father’s farm, two gunshots from the Abbey of Seuilly, and a league from Chinon, the town where he grew beneath his father’s wing until he began his studies to become a Franciscan monk. By the time he pens Pantagruel (of which Gargantua is a prequel), he is familiar with at least four professions and one art: the law from his father, the priesthood and medicine from their practice, the new learning from ancient sages, and poetry through his epistolary exchanges in verse with the poet Jean Bouchet. What a stock of technical terms, argument forms, and higher powers Rabelais could employ, parody, and appeal to; what grammatical categories, rhetorical schemes, rimes équivoques and batelées (lines ambiguous and overloaded as a boat); what changes rung from words like those from bells might he muster: sixty-four verbs in the imperfect tense, necessary to roll a barrel out of town in a cluster of shove and sound, “le tournoit, viroit, brouilloit, garbouilloit, hersoit, versoit, renversoit …” and so on … “nattoit, grat-toit, flattoit …” as, in English, we might group “crash, clash, mash, smash, slash, bash, trash, gnash …” to dep
ict the passage of our armored vehicles through a village. (Donald Frame. François Rabelais. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977.)

  Later in his life, in his role as a physician, Rabelais often traveled to Lyons or Rome as a part of Cardinal Jean du Bellay’s retinue, but as a young priest he did his rounds in the region of his birth, la molle et douce Touraine, and in the regal town of Chinon itself, once capital to a shrunken France (1528–1529), known to tourists now for one of Joan of Arc’s early exploits. Scholars have frequently remarked Rabelais’s intensive knowledge of the region: its cloth, its donkeys, its windmills, the height of its hemp, its “sweet, easy, warm, wet and well-soaked soil,” and how well he rendered them all—towns, towers, lanterns, rivers, walls—in properly apportioned paragraphs. “Dressed in his Benedictine’s habit, he mixed with the people more than any writer of his time. He knew the art of loosening the tongues of the cattle-drover in the field, the artisan in his workshop, the merchant in the inn. He can, on occasion, make use of their dialect, their familiar metaphors, their customary swearwords,” Plattard writes. Gargantua and Pantagruel are so drenched, like the soil, in locales that Albert Jay Nock devoted a chatty travelogue to these places (A Journey into Rabelais’ France. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1934).

  The heroes of the New Learning—beginning with Guillaume Budé, Thomas More, Desiderius Erasmus, his self-designated student, Rabelais, and flowering in the great Baroque outbursts of Michel de Montaigne, Robert Burton, and, later, Sir Thomas Browne—were devoted multilingual quoters; however, in them, as often as not, the citations were offered as examples of ignorance and superstition on the part of their authors and held up as warnings to the unwary: What oft’s been thought is now so little thought of.

  To quote pagan authors is more than fun—it suggests that there are other authorities than have been favored by the scholastics—and to write about them in the vulgate is to invite readers to look on pages that the Church has resolutely kept from popular perusal, as if, on their own, such readers would be prone to misconstrue—taking a path that led straight to the stake. Moreover, it had been a habit through many centuries to consult books rather than inspect afresh what the books were presumed to be about; to cite authorities, to quote the fathers of the Church, to pit one scholar’s paragraphs against another’s; thus to debate each issue inside the precincts of the word, and this lawyerlike practice was hard to break. For instance—ah yes, an instance!—a scholar whose work Rabelais read in his youth (a man pridefully disputatious, whose skull will grind its teeth at going nameless here) had written a brief essay on marital proprieties, the illiberal views of which had elicited a sturdy defense of women’s rights from—worse yet!—his closest friend. This required a rebuttal, duly given in a second edition, where he beat his opponent about the brow and brain by citing, in confirmation of his position, “authorities as numerous as they were varied. [He] quoted pell-mell philosophers and poets, historians and orators, Livy and Cicero, Plato and Petrarch, Ezechiel and Propertius. The work became thus considerably enlarged. From the 27 pages which composed the original edition it had grown to 276,” as—the whistle of my own citation can be heard—Jean Plattard reports.

  Socrates’ presence is pointed in other ways than that of his nose, since, at least as early as Abelard’s Dialectica (1118), the Greek philosopher was a figure of fun for the schoolmen. Abelard does a jocose dance about the proposition—“if Socrates is asinine, some man is asinine”—though, as his biographer M. T. Clanchy reports, he later softened his moral disapproval (Abelard: A Medieval Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Clanchy remarks that “logicians had traditionally and unthinkingly treated Socrates disrespectfully because they were not concerned with historical realities nor with people’s feelings.”

  If Alcibiades can serve up Socrates as a sample of the wise fool, and Rabelais’s reader can then remember how the renowned Erasmus has praised folly while wondering who the truly foolish are, then perhaps I may make my own reminder of how frequently it was felt that wild, unseemly, flatulated words would surely issue from a similarly grotesque and corpulent person. Gargantua, our hero here, is as fulminatious as his flesh is flabby, and only after decency has been drilled into him can he deliver an admirable speech in a restrained and balanced Ciceronian style. Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Molière’s Tartuffe are outstanding examples, as is the lesser-known character, Vanderhulk, of Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, a grotesque whose existence I was made aware of by Wayne Rebhorn in The Emperor of Men’s Minds (another citation within a citation, worth doubled points). This fellow “had a sulphurous, big, swollen, large face like a Saracen, eyes like two Kentish oysters, a mouth that opened as wide every time he spake as one of those old knit trap doors, a beard as though it had been made of a bird’s nest plucked in pieces which consisteth of straw, hair, and dirt mixed together (480)” (Rebhorn). One must remark, by the way, that Rabelais would never mess up his line with real redundancy the way Nashe did—“big, swollen, large” indeed. No, Rabelais’s redundancies redound. But what is a “knit trap door”? Is it a concealing rug? A confederate of the tea cozy? Or a round sphincter-type opening that closes behind a netted fish? To meet new words is to encounter new wonders.

  Nor should we be deceived, as we read—by coarseness, indulgence, logorrhea—to suppose there is nothing but mooning going on in Gargantua or Pantagruel, naught but cocking a snook at authority, and other boyish pranks, or simply exuberance fizzing from bottle end and fundament like an organized spritzelation of shaken soda. The point of the opening reference to Socrates’ appearance and the reality of his payoff remains unaffected: This book will appear wooly and rough, its course haphazard, but its sense is consistent, unified, pure yet iridescent, as though silk had swallowed water, and it has been set down more in weeping than in writing, more in despair than glee, more when sober than when drunk; and though drunkenness is a frequent occupation of its actors, we should fear not an actual stagger, because stage cups are always full of tea. Our author is besotted, but by words; he is intoxicated with learning, with his own strength; walls are a-tumblin’ down, those of castle and cathedral, city and convent, college and library.

  At the close of Plato’s banquet, at daybreak, when all the evening’s revelers and rhetoricians have passed out, Socrates rises from among the sleepers and goes to spend the balance of the day in his customary manner, for the philosopher feels no fuddle, and reason does not weary of its work; nor will it here, because the philosopher’s distant student has also wakened early, left the priestly functions toward which his studious nature had initially inclined him, and begun his service as a physician, consequently as a scholar of Hippocrates and Galen, among the Greeks the more empirically inclined. Now to Rabelais’s dislike of traditional schoolmen is added a disdain for the traditional physician. “These fellows get their experience by killing folks (as Pliny once complained); and they are a source of greater danger, even, than any that comes from disease itself.” (Quoted by Samuel Putnam. François Rabelais: Man of the Renaissance. New York: Cape & Smith, 1929.)

  Princes and their petty yet ruinous wars; indolent, hypocritical monks and their parasitical lives; the theologians of the Sorbonne, who misuse reason and disgrace intelligence; the venerators of holy relics and pious pilgrims; purveyors of popular superstitions of every stripe—these are the objects of our author’s scorn, as it should be our concern to steer clear of them today, though they may call their sects, professions, and their parties by newer noble-sounding names.

  Rabelais’s anger at those who are tethered to their texts is evidence of his own released mind, but it is partly paradoxical, since he is as bookish as they. He, however, is eating fresh fruit from old trees instead of winter’s barreled apples, and we can turn to him as he returned to Plato and Socrates. Gargantua and Pantagruel, so far in the past, as comets come, can arrive like a new age to surprise our eyes. These works seem written for today; they are as relevant, and possibly as futile. Between the brackets insert your favorit
e bêtes noires. “[These scholars and medics] can well enough see the light-boat of lies battered and leaking in every part; yet they insist upon retaining, by force and by violence, those works to which they have been accustomed from their youth up. If one endeavours to snatch these away from them, they feel that he is, at the same time, snatching away their very souls.” (Putnam.) Did the humanists not feel similarly violated when the Church arrested their Greek books? And burned pages, set fire to their authors, and lit their readers, too, as Brown notes. After Rabelais edits a new edition of Hippocrates, he has a Latin couplet placed upon its title page, which reads: “Here is the overflowing font of healing lore. Drink here, unless the stagnant water of a ditch tastes better to you.” (Putnam.)

  Scholars have noticed the metaphoric connection of science with salubrious imbibing in Rabelais, though it must be remembered that reading a book of symptoms is not the same as taking a pulse. “Drink” is what Gargantua cries as he’s being born, instead of the customary “waa waa”; the third and fourth books are given over in large part to a search for the Divine Bottle, as if it were the Holy Grail; and in the fifth part, whose authenticity is disputed, the oracle of the Divine Bouteille delivers wisdom’s secret, which is—no surprise from the lips of a bottle—Drink! Moreover, Pantagruel makes a pre-Rabelasian appearance in a medieval mystery play, where his role is that of an impish devil who gathers salt from the seashore to shake down the throats of snoring drunkards.

  His salary at the Great Hospital of Lyons did not achieve jingle, and, deprived of the Church’s free room and board or the indulgences of some courtly master, Rabelais must have often slept without covers or companion, eaten tack, and drunk from a dry glass. So straitened circumstances probably alerted him to the possibility of a windfall of his own when a small book, the illegitimate offspring of the Arthurian legends, anonymously transcribed from the oral tradition, sold more copies in two months than Bibles in nine years (Plattard). It retold the story of how Merlin, the magician, created a family of giants, sort of medieval superheroes, out of the bones of two male whales, a sprinkle of clippings from Queen Genièvre’s nails, plus a soupçon of blood from one of Sir Lancelot’s wounds, to help out King Arthur through his many tribulations. In his study of Rabelais, Donald Frame tells us, that the loving pair, Grant-Gosier (or the Great Gullet that LeClercq has insisted on inserting into his translation wherever possible) and Galemelle (who, as Gargamelle, bears Gargantua for eleven months in Rabelais’s version before dumping him with a thump into a nest of citations that prove why lengthy gestations are necessary for masterpieces) … well, the two make their way between grasping parentheses, bearing their brute of a boy on the back of a city-size mare, “through France to join Arthur; but the parents [who suffer a fever like a wound along the way] die at Mont-Saint-Michel for lack of a purgative. Merlin transports Gargantua to Arthur on a cloud; fighting for Arthur, Gargantua conquers the Gos and Magos, the Dutch and the Irish, and a twelve-cubit giant in single combat. Finally, after two hundred years, he is translated to fairyland….” On the other hand, Paul Eldridge (François Rabelais: The Great Storyteller. Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1971) claims that the parents died because of the purgative, not for want of one, and boasts that Gargantua forced all of the prisoners he’d taken (as if they were sweets, I suppose) into his hollow tooth in lieu of a filling (Eldridge). But I have heard (from Plattard) that he also stuffed the cuffs of his sleeves, his game bag, and the toes of his hose with his victims. Tales of yore should yield such variations; the more there are, the merrier they make us. Always consult many authorities; they will infect you with suspicion—a desirable service. (All over France still, Eldridge says, there are menhirs and dolmens named Gargantua’s Chair or Gargantua’s Spoon, Finger, Shoe, Pissing Rock, Tomb. It gives pleasure to know these things.)