A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  This anonymous author happily supplied the details necessary to tall tales, and we are familiar with them in the form of the Paul Bunyan legend, or many of the stories that floated with the boatmen down the Mississippi, or those that boasted of trappers who, barehanded, fought bear and cougar in a frontier forest. How big, how strong, how hungry was the lumberjack, the boatman, the hunter? “… Gargantua lunched off two shipfuls of fresh herrings and three casks of salted mackerel; … he dined on three hundred cattle and two hundred sheep; … he carried off the bells of Notre-Dame de Paris to hang them on his mare’s neck; … his peals of laughter were heard seven and a half leagues away …” Not a decibel less, not a yard more. (“… this specious exactitude is another feature of popular comedy.” [Plattard.])

  So Rabelais’s monsters must outdo the outdoers … and they do. Their habits of hyperbole do not exclude their author, who swears in Pantagruel’s prologue: “may I be carried off by a hundred thousand basketfuls of fine devils, body and soul, innards and entrails, if I lie by so much as a single word in the whole story …,” a protestation exceeded only by the punishments to be inflicted upon readers who do not obediently believe. Like the pamphlet that preceded it, Pantagruel is packed with gross-out japes and overscale jokes, with mythological deeds that mock the social and religious figments that one must pretend to believe out of fear of just those pains Rabelais promises his own disbelievers—“sulphur, flames and the bottomless pit.”

  By turning everything topsy-turvy, it mimics the meanings and rituals of medieval carnivals and festivals, too, a fundamental aspect of Rabelais’s human comedy famously described by Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). The school of Russian formalists with which Bakhtin was associated had made considerable advances in the study of folktales and legends, particularly in terms of their narrative forms; so Rabelais’s reliance on the life and laughter of common people made ideal material for the Russian critic’s cast of mind. Gargantua and Pantagruel belonged to the culture of popular carnival humor, of which there were, he felt, three basic manifestations: ritual spectacles, such as carnival pageants, fools’ day celebrations, and marketplace entertainments; written as well as oral parodies in both Latin and their local dialects; and various sorts of slanging matches, cursing patterns, catch-phrases, and what we call “trash talk” now.

  So the giants are giants because they began their lives outside of Rabelais’s world as giants. Rabelais acknowledges this in his prologue to Pantagruel. However, they remain giants; they flourish as giants for further reasons, many of them naming and enumerative, and because a giant was a good visual symbol for a group, a class, an order, a faith, an army, a nation. Our author was painfully aware of the rapacity of kings, counts, cardinals and bishops, whose entourages ate like the armies that periodically swept over the countryside, gobbling up everything that couldn’t be hidden from them. His imagery anticipates Hobbes’s invention of that artificial body, the “corporate giant.”

  In 1651, when Thomas Hobbes published his great work on our need to relinquish rights to form an absolute sovereignty and escape the chaos of a state of nature, he fronted his text with an engraving that depicted the figure of a king whose body was made of many men—a corporate Leviathan—just as his treatise advised; and to ensure his own safety, during the difficult times of civil war in which he wrote, Hobbes gave the ruler Oliver Cromwell’s face, while upon the Lord Protector’s head he placed the crown of a Catholic, Charles II—a duplicity Rabelais would have understood, since, like so many others in his time, he published under a pseudonym at first (Alcofribas Nasier, a transparent anagram of his own name), and the books he wrote were regularly proscribed.

  The little story of the medlars that appears on the first pages of Pantagruel furnishes a good context for the understanding of the preternatural swellings that afflict this text and all its occupants. When Cain kills Abel, the earth becomes soaked in the blood of the victim and bears in consequence an abundance of fruit. The normally compact leathery crab apples that the medlar tree produces were in the subsequent season so large that three of them sufficed for a bushel. The text has scarcely taken a step, yet it has managed to traduce two biblical tales, pun on God’s injunction to “be fruitful,” and redo Eden’s celebrated seduction as a menacing farce—which, come to think of it, it is. The side effects of medlar gorging were not all benevolent, nor should we have expected them to be, if we remember the blood of injustice that stimulated their growth. “All of them [who ate the apples] suffered from a really horrible swelling on their bodies, but not all of them had it in the same place.” (B 7.) Some grew bellies so big, they were called “Almighties” to mock the manner in which the Apostles’ Creed refers to God, but they were good people “and from this race sprang St Paunch, and Pancake Day” (which is Brown’s translation of its calendar name, Shrove Tuesday, and true to its spirit). Some became hunchbacks; soon there were those who had phalluses so long, they wrapped them around their waists like belts; still others had to bear bollocks the size of the medlars responsible, and so on into a parody of the generational lists of Genesis. This augmentation is best achieved grammatically by dispensing with the general term and replacing it with an organized mob of particulars or requiring a noun to do the work of an adjective or a verb, as in this passage that drew Albert Jay Nock’s admiration.

  There was then in the abbey [of Seuilly] a claustral monk called Friar John of the Funnels, young, gallant, frisk, lusty, nimble, quick, active, bold, adventurous, resolute, tall, lean, wide-mouthed, long-nosed, a rare mumbler of matins, unbridler of masses and runner-over of vigils; and to conclude summarily in a word, a right monk, if ever there were any, since the monking world monked a monkery. (Nock.)

  Whether, as the schoolmen had debated, there were real universals, which had being apart from that of their particulars, or only specific material things enjoyed existence, Rabelais knew that Man the Mighty was like a giant individual, and since he was a creature principally engaged in eating, excreting, killing, and begetting—one that used its brain to obtain cash and buy comfort, a friend of whoever might be of service, always seeking personal security, pleasant company, and a tapped keg, and forever in need of enemies to justify its own excesses—we might expect it to lay waste much wherever it was, if only by snoring, thus breaking windows, or by poisoning crops before they could be eaten through breaking wind from its last debauch. This special giant, Pantagruel, was already known to all as a provoker of thirst, a harbinger of drought and cracked earth, and in Rabelais’s terms, he creates desire as well, needs that swell like cheeks about an infected tooth.

  But Rabelais is not long content with giants, and soon introduces a Ulysses of his own—Panurge—a cunning riddler, a sly boots, a devious trickster yet a loyal friend, whom Pantagruel meets upon the road in a wretchedly disheveled condition and whom he questions before deciding to offer assistance. In a brilliant bravura passage that could have been stolen from Joyce’s Ulysses, Panurge replies first in German, then in Gibberish, Italian, Scots, Basque, Lanternlandish, Dutch, Spanish (“I am tired of talking so much”), Danish, Ancient Greek, Utopian, Latin, and finally, of course, in his native tongue, the French of Touraine. Impressed—as who wouldn’t be?—Pantagruel orders Panurge to be properly fed, after which the polyglot sleeps till dinnertime the next day, when he comes to table “in a hop, skip, and a jump.” (Chapter 9.) Which is American for quickly.

  I remember a similar kind of academic contest. In Germany, a number of writers had passages from their books recited to them in a language they were unlikely to understand (in this case, it was Romanian). We were asked to identify the authors of each passage. Would we even recognize our own? I remember it well because I won. The secret was in the rhetorical rhythms that the translations retained. There is plenty of rhetorical rhythm in Rabelais, and it conveys a zest and energy, a boyish nose-thumbing glee, that is not equaled, to my ear, by any other writer. But it is not always used to make jokes, for t
here is much here that is serious on its face as well as strongly meant in its heart. Nor does the fun Rabelais has with higher education, the law, or the Church mean that he has embraced ignorance, lawlessness, and disbelief; it is, rather, that, then as now, the stupid, the greedy, the hypocritical, the disloyal or tyrannical serve virtue as badly as they profit vice. Our lawyer jokes should not suggest we wish to dispense with legal services—just shysters; and neither should Erasmus’s anticlericalism nor Rabelais’s invectives against priests lead us to think they are not utterly devout. The fact is (and it is a sad one) that the age was a lot freer in its permissible range of blasphemy and verbal indecencies than ours is now, though making the wrong enemies then could lose you more than a sect’s bloc of bigot votes.

  Pantagruel went through two editions with a swiftness that hurried Gargantua into existence, a work less dependent upon its predecessors, more inclined to realism than to whimsies about the wearers of the larger sizes or events exceeding the miraculous, and more likely to set its scenes in locales familiar to the reader than in lands far away and never-never. Meanwhile, like a ragman, Rabelais has been collecting his material much as we might imagine Brueghel doing: insults, for instance, children’s games, bum wipes, countries that were being conquered during the cake bakers’ war. This war, like the disagreements between Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Alice, is over a trifling refusal of a bunch of griddlecake bakers to sell a portion of their wares to some shepherds who were passing a few otherwise idle and sheepish hours in preventing starlings from eating the grapes then ripening on the farmers’ vines. The shepherds offered the going price, which was apparently less on the road than the bakers expected to collect once they were in town. They fire off a volley of insults in reply: In Rabelais, twenty-eight of them, and in Cohen the same, but from Brown fly only twenty-six, while LeClercq’s twenty-seven are more sporadically delivered, and Urquhart overwhelms his victims with forty-two fancy revilements that fall as if a storm of hailstones came in attractively different shapes and sizes.

  This rudeness leads to a quarrel that starts a fight, which results in injuries that must be requited, and so from a contretemps set steaming by pride and stirred by greed, ignorance, fear, and suspicion—a nothing upon which are soon erected reasons like artillery positions—a battle—as always, fought with lies and lost lives—begins what will prosper as a war: a war that forbearance cannot forestall or calm, a war that consumes a list—aforecited—of conquered countries, but also the spoils of an invading army; indeed, that list is the pillagers’ verbal equivalent. “They made off with oxen, cows, bulls, calves, heifers, ewes, sheep, nanny-goats and billy-goats; hens, capons, chickens, goslings, ganders and geese; pigs, sows and piglets; they knocked down walnuts, harvested vines, carried off vinestocks, and shook down all the fruit from the trees.” (Brown, Gargantua.) That, the King of the Offended Bakers said, “would teach them to eat cake.”

  But what taskmasters habitually forget is how to teach others their lessons without having to learn any themselves.

  In the course of this contest, Grandgousier (the king of the country attacked and the father of Gargantua) takes a notable prisoner, called Swashbuckler out of respect for Errol Flynn. After questioning this prisoner in order to learn what his enemy intended by the invasion, and discovering that Picrochole (for that was the warlord’s name) means to conquer the entire country, Grandgousier (demonstrating his wisdom as well as his relevance to our times, as I am sure was his intention) releases Swashbuckler with the following observation about his opponent:

  “It would have been better if he had stayed at home, governing it like a king—rather than insolently invading mine, pillaging it like an enemy. If he had governed his land he would have extended it, but by pillaging mine he will be destroyed. Be off with you, in the name of God. Follow the Good; point out to your king the errors of his that you are aware of, and never give him advice for the sake of your own personal profit, for if the commonwealth is lost, so is the individual and his property. As for your ransom, I give it all to you, and desire that your weapons and your horse be returned to you. This is how things ought to be between neighbours and old friends….”

  Swashbuckler does not depart without gifts. Nor did Rabelais’s readers, who laughed, heartily, most of them, as if they had gotten the gist, and digested its moral; yet they obeyed kings and cardinals, princes and priests nevertheless, where they believed their interests lay, or where their fears were focused; and so confusion and catastrophe continue, in plenty and in colorful variety, to this day. I notice that there are apples in our shops so huge, it takes only three of them to heap a bushel. Our ferociously fertile earth is that soaked, our fruit that malevolent.

  THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY

  During the early seventeenth century, men everywhere in Europe were beginning to realize that the institutions that had seemed to offer them hope and keep them from care were actually making them fearful of their fate, and encouraging them to trade their lives for lies. The world was now wider than anyone had previously imagined—ships had sailed it round; the heavens were on quite another course than had been sworn to; social organizations were being drastically revised and power was slipping from Popes to princes, from the universal Church to the secular state; former methods of deciding things were now utterly up in the air; rude and vigorous vernaculars were driving back Latin everywhere (Dante, Descartes, and Hobbes would ennoble several vulgar tongues by their employment); people were lifting their heads from canonical books to look boldly around, and what they saw first were errors, plentiful as leaves. Delight and despair took turns managing their moods.

  The past is never lightly thrown off, though it often seems doffed like a hat with a flourish or carelessly tossed like a cape into a corner; it is only a cap that’s been removed, only an old coat there in its puddle. Young men were watching the new day dawn with old minds, and traditional intentions. Robert Burton boldly chastises the clergy for their ceremonious pomp, hypocritical zeal, and scandalous lapses, but it is the pomp, the zeal, the lapses he is after, and he is careful to keep his new faith clear of the old Church’s ritual forms and corporate grip. Sir Thomas Browne was rewarded for his royalist loyalties with a knighthood, and his most popular book about vulgar errors, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, omitted a number of crucial ones, while he keeps helpfully at hand the “unspeakable mysteries” of the Scriptures; Descartes aimed to set his religion back on sound foundations, even if he did make its bones dance, and rightly feared Bruno’s burning at the stake; Burton’s skepticism, like Montaigne’s, and Descartes’s later, is persistent but programmatic, an epistemological strategy, not a deep state of mind; Thomas Hobbes, playing both sides of the English Civil War to perfection, would place Cromwell’s face on the giant whose image would serve to front his Leviathan (a body politic literally made of a crowd of bodies squeezed into the outline of a sovereign), while on that Protestant head he impressed a Catholic crown; Bacon, More, and Montaigne all sought ways to release science to follow every scent Nature might emit so long as it never treed Divinity.

  Of all the habits that were hard to break, being bookish was perhaps the most difficult. Now, in addition to the Scriptures, there would be all the classical authors you had the opportunity to cite—the honor of the first quote in Burton’s address to the reader goes to Seneca—thereby showing generosity in the “loan” of the resources of your library and by your readiness to “spread the word,” just as you also took good care to gather books and manuscripts, diligently copying passages from the volumes that had to pass through, rather than remain in, your hands. Guided by a genius, the pages of a commonplace book could be transformed into an original and continuously argued text, as Ben Jonson did with Discoveries—a form that Burton’s Anatomy sometimes resembles though never mimics.