Some books are good for you, and some books are fun to read, but few
books are both; Rabelais’ novels are among these few. A
cornucopia of jokes, unforgettable characters, filth, sex, philosophy,
and religion, Rabelais’ novels create our cultural DNA while
they make us laugh. When we laugh at the mythical giants Pantagruel
and Gargantua and their companions, we laugh at ourselves. We laugh
until we hurt, sometimes having to put the book down or look back over
the passage to make sure that we have really read what we think we
have. All the while we are following the heroes and their friends and
enemies as they react to the burgeoning world of modern nation states,
modern science, modern law, and modern forms of religion, we can see
how we have become what we are today. Without Rabelais and his
contemporaries Cervantes and Shakespeare, modernity would not exist as
we know it. Just as tilting at windmills and princely indecision have
become commonplace in our modern culture, so too terms such as
Gargantuan and Rabelaisian have been used to describe
people and things very foreign to the French Renaissance (the term
Gargantuan even ends up being featured in Quentin
Tarantino’s latest film, Kill Bill: Volume Two). And yet,
like Cervantes’ mock epic and Shakespeare’s plays,
Rabelais’ novels are critical texts deeply rooted in their time.
Pantagruel, Gargantua, and the other novels are critical
not only of the medieval past which provides so many of the ridiculous
characters that Pantagruel and Gargantua and their cohorts ridicule
with such gusto; they also criticize the new and supposedly modern
world emerging from the “gothic shadows” of the medieval
past. This critique is always done with a laugh -- albeit sometimes a
sardonic one -- because laughter, as the narrator of Gargantua
explains, is what makes us human.
Born sometime around 1483, near Chinon in the west of France, Rabelais
was a man of vast and profound learning. There were few areas in
European society and culture that did not arouse Rabelais’
interest, and he made his mark in areas as diverse as medicine, law,
botany, and politics. His curiosity, however, did not always meet with
the approval of the powers that be: His travails with authority began
early, when he was a young Franciscan monk. The Sorbonne, the
theological university in Paris, forbid the study of Greek because it
escaped the control of ecclesiastical authorities, and Rabelais, who
had begun to study Greek with some of his friends, had his books
confiscated. He obtained the right to transfer to a Dominican
monastery near Poitiers because the Dominicans were thought to be a
more intellectually tolerant order. Even that environment was not
challenging enough for him, and, in 1528, he left the monastery for
Paris in order to continue his studies. Shortly after arriving in
Paris, he became a secular priest, without the permission of church
authorities, and had two children, François and Junie, with a
widow. Always on the move and insatiably curious, Rabelais went to
study medicine, in 1530, in Montpellier, the foremost medical
university in France. Despite making a strong impression on his
teachers and colleagues, Rabelais left Montpelier in 1532 for Lyon
without having finished his medical studies.
Lyon was perhaps the liveliest intellectual center in France in the
early sixteenth century for geographical and economic
reasons. Intellectual life in Paris was still influenced by the
presence of the Sorbonne. The “Sorbonnagres,” as Rabelais
called the doughty professors of the Sorbonne, were little inclined to
accept the radical critique Erasmus, Luther, Rabelais, and other
thinkers of their ilk were making of the medieval church and other
institutions. Lyon was much more open to the winds of change blowing
through Europe, especially from Italy, because of its close commercial
ties with Florence. The literary contributions of Lyon were
extraordinary, including the Neo-platonic poetry of Maurice
Scève and the sensual and provocative poems of Louis
Labé, as well as the writings of the unfortunate humanist book
printer Étienne Dolet who would be hanged in 1546 in Paris for
printing censured books. It was in Lyon that Rabelais’ literary
talents began to blossom, but it was his medical expertise that
guaranteed his early success there. Despite his lack of a medical
degree, Rabelais was named doctor of one the largest hospitals in
France in 1532, the Hôtel-Dieu de Notre-Dame de Pitié du
Pont-du-Rhône, where he would remain employed until 1535.
It was while he was in Lyon that Rabelais published both of his first
two novels. The first, Pantagruel, was published in 1532, and
the second, Gargantua, in 1534. Pantagruel was a figure from
medieval mystery plays who personified thirst. Rabelais took this
figure and made him a giant. Garguantua, whom Rabelais made into
Pantagruel’s father, was a figure appearing in very popular
books that were sold at the book fair in Lyon during that time. Even
if he had published two of the most important novels ever to be
written in French, it was thanks to his talents as a doctor that
Rabelais was able to make the pilgrimage to Rome that many humanists
in Europe were making in order to see the modern vestiges of the glory
of the ancient world that they were trying to resurrect in their
“renaissance.” When Jean du Bellay, the bishop of Paris,
was sent to Rome by King Francis I to negotiate the suspension of Pope
Clement VII’s excommunication of the English king, Henry VIII,
he invited Rabelais to come along as his personal doctor and
secretary. Rabelais arrived in Rome in January 1534 and immediately
set about studying the local flora with the idea of writing a book on
Roman botany, which he never published. He would return to Italy again
in 1539 and in 1542 with Jean Du Bellay’s brother Guillaume, the
Lord of Langey, who had been named governor of the Piedmont, the
Italian provinces the French claimed as their own. In 1542, he
published a new and revised edition of Gargantua and
Pantagruel in which he replaced some of the more scabrous terms
with which he referred to the religious authorities. Despite these
changes, two years later the Sorbonne added Rabelais’ books to
the list of censured books.
In 1545 Rabelais published his Third Book with a royal
privilege; even more importantly, he published it using his own name
and not that of Alcofribas Nazier, the pseudonym he had used to
publish Pantagruel and Gargantua. The royal privilege
might have protected the author and the publisher’s rights in
regards to other publishers, but it did not protect Rabelais from the
Sorbonne, which condemned him yet again. After the Sorbonne’s
condemnation, Rabelais found the atmosphere in Paris a little too hot
and took refuge in Metz in the east of France where he stayed from the
spring of 1546 through the spring of 1547. When he was sent back to
Italy by Jean du Bellay in 1547, for his fourth and final visit, he
stopped off in Lyon and dropped off eleven chapters of what would
become the Fourth Book with his publisher. This first edition
of the Fourth Book appeared in 1548; a lengthier and revised
edition of the Fourth Book was printed in 1552. Rabelais
returned to France in 1549 and died in 1553 in Paris. A Fifth
Book was published posthumously in 1564, but many specialists
believe that only part of this last book was actually written by
Rabelais himself.
Curiously for an author so often associated with excess, as in the
terms Gargantuan and Rabelaisian, perhaps the most
recurrent theme throughout Rabelais’ novels is the concept of
moderation. Moderation was a scarce commodity in the bloody and
fractious sixteenth century when Protestants and Catholics seemed bent
on destroying each other in ways modern readers can only too easily
understand by looking at the religious and ethnic disputes ripping
apart our present day. Rabelais, like his mentor Erasmus, and the
great French essayist, Montaigne, was a moderate in a time of radical
and partisan extremism. Throughout his novels, whether he was talking
about how to read his works in the prologue to Gargantua, or
about salvation in Pantagruel, or making scabrous and
scatological allusions about a woodcutter’s “axe” in
the prologue to the Fourth Book, Rabelais never ceased making
the case for moderation. If we are moderate we can all live together
allowing for each other’s differences and foibles; unfortunately
it was a lesson lost in the gathering insanity of sixteenth-century
France. Catholics and Protestants seemed inextricably locked into a
vortex of religious hatred that would end in the ruthless wars of
religion that saw thousands of French subjects brutally hacked to
death and thrown into the rivers that would turn red with blood as
described in the extraordinary, if not highly partisan epic poem,
Tragiques, written by the Huguenot Agrippa d’Aubigné
at the end of the century.
The increasingly bitter conflict between Protestants and Catholics
matches the ever-darker tones of Rabelais’ humor. The spirit of
the Renaissance as a time of renewal and revitalization imbue the
early novels, Pantagruel and Gargantua, with a sense of
hope. Rabelais, like his contemporaries such as Erasmus and Guillaume
Budé thought that the “restitution of good letters”
promised a cultural and political future that would stand in marked
opposition to the “gothic ignorance” they associated with
the Middle Ages. Humanists were especially hopeful that the reign of
the new French king, Francis I, who had been crowned in 1515, and who
was a supporter of the new humanistic learning, would bring positive
change. Francis’ establishment of the College of Royal Readers
(Collège des Lecteurs Royaux) in 1530 was indicative of
this new spirit of learning and enlightened rule. The curriculum of
this college, organized around the study of Greek, Hebrew, and
classical Latin, symbolized the hopes of humanists who thought that it
was necessary to return to the ancient texts in the original languages
in order to establish a new nation both culturally and politically. The
College also represented a break with the authority of the Catholic
Church since it placed university learning under the auspices of the
king rather than the church. The passages in Pantagruel and
Gargantua in which Rabelais describes the ideal education of the
king cannot be separated from these developments or from texts such as
On the Education of the Christian Prince by Erasmus (1516) and
the Education of the Prince by Guillaume Budé
(1547). Rabelais, Erasmus, and Budé all considered the education
of the prince as one of the primary responsibilities of humanist
intellectuals such as themselves.
During that time, Francis I also protected French Protestants and the
reformers known as Evangéliques who wanted to transform
the Catholic Church from within. Both Protestants and Evangelicals
wanted to bring the Christian Church back to the Gospel
(Evangile in French) and to correct what they perceived as the
overly ceremonial nature of the late-medieval church. Francis was
especially conscious of this spirit of religious tolerance since his
sister, Marguerite, a renowned author in her right, was one of the
chief protectors of the reformers both within and without the church.
This period of religious tolerance began to become unraveled however
in 1534, following the “Affair of the Posters”
(L’Affaire des placards) when posters denouncing the mass
and other Catholic rituals were plastered throughout France during the
nights of 17-18 October, even in the king’s bedroom in
Fontainebleau. Religious reform was no longer only a question of
theological interpretation, but was now a question of political
sedition and the king had to take action against the reformers. The
long descent into the horror of the religious wars began.
Modern readers are often struck by the difference in tone between the
riotous and often vulgar humor of Pantagruel and
Gargantua, and the darker and more biting humor of the Third
Book (1536) and the Fourth Book (1552). The optimistic
humor of the first books becomes the gallows humor of the last ones;
all of them are funny, but the tone of the humor changes. If the first
are akin to the humor of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy or Voltaire’s Candide, the latter are closer
to the darker hues of Kafka’s The Trial or Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22. The hope and promise of
Pantagruel and Gargantua are grounded in a humanistic
optimism about human nature, while the bleaker outlook of the Third
Book and the Fourth Book seems to perceive human beings
with less benevolent eyes. Yet even in these bleaker tomes, Rabelais
never seems to despair of human beings; at heart they have the
capacity to do good. Amid the folly of contemporary sixteenth-century
society in which obsequious papists (Papimanes) and rigid
antipapists (Papefigues) are paired one against the other, the
Pantagruelians offer the hope that true Christian charity and true
humanist learning can carry the day.
Rabelais has had his critical ups and downs through the centuries. In
the seventeenth century in France, Rabelais was much reviled as the
comic but somewhat raunchy humor of the Renaissance went out of style.
La Bruyère called Rabelais’ books monstrous, and Pierre
Bayle had very little to say in his favor. A great exception to this
trend is Molière, whose plays share Rabelais’
comic verve. In England, Rabelais was better received in the
seventeenth century. It is very likely that Shakespeare knew Rabelais;
the pedant Holofern, for example, in Love’s Labour Lost
is so close to Tubal Holophernes, Gargantua’s first tutor, in
both name and character, that some common influence can be surmised.
In a similar vein, Thomas Nash, another enemy of pedants and puritans,
shares a prose style close to Rabelais’, and Francis Bacon, one
of the most important figures of the English seventeenth-century,
called Rabelais “the great jester of France.”French
writers of the eighteenth century were divided on Rabelais; Voltaire,
who seems so close to Rabelais in so many ways, called Rabelais’
novels extravagant and unintelligible. Denis Diderot, on the other
hand, was effusive in his praise of Rabelais. Diderot, the author of
Jacques the Fatalist, which is imbued with the spirit of
Pantagruel and Gargantua, referred to Rabelais as the “sovereign
pontife of the cup.” In England, in the eighteenth century, once
again, Rabelais was very popular. Laurence Sterne, the author of
Tristram Shandy, venerated Rabelais, and Gulliver’s
Travels by Jonathan Swift also contains many allusions to
Rabelais.
French writers of the nineteenth century were more favorably disposed
to Rabelais, especially in the latter part of the century. If, early in
the century, the French critic Sainte-Beuve followed La
Bruyère’s lead saying that reading Rabelais was akin to
trying to cross a large rubbish-strewn square, later writers such as
Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert were great
fans. Hugo called Rabelais one of the fourteen geniuses who had honored
humanity, and Flaubert said that he, as Molière had before him,
kept Rabelais on his bedside table. Twentieth-century writers who have
taken a somewhat jaundiced but comic view of human existence such as
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, Joseph Heller, Franz Kafka, and
Thomas Pynchon can all be seen writing in the wake of Rabelais’
satiric novels. These modern writers, like Rabelais himself, belong to
a long tradition of comic and satiric literature that also includes
writers such as Aristophanes, Plautus, the authors of the medieval
fabliaux, Chaucer, and Bocaccio. It is a tradition that goes back as
far as human beings have made fools of themselves; it is likely that
this tradition will continue.
Like the heroes of the medieval chivalric romances they satirized,
Pantagruel, Gargantua, and their cohorts travel in search of a grail
which seems forever beyond their reach. All of the books follow the
gigantic heroes and their companions in search of answers to specific
questions and, more generally, of wisdom. Almost every institution of
sixteenth-century society, from the church to the Courts of law, are
made the objects of Rabelais’ comic wit during these travels. At
the heart of these books is a critical but benevolent gaze on all
things human, including the literary tradition. In many ways, it is a
somewhat cruel irony to find Rabelais placed on the list of some
sacrosanct canon of Western tradition. If he is a part of that
tradition, he is, as so many great authors are, deeply critical of any
list that might constitute a canon. Like that other great and more
recent Pantagruelian, Groucho Marx, Rabelais did not seem to want to
be part of any club that would accept him. All the partisan members in
the culture wars, spouting off about who is and who is not a canonical
author, should never forget that some of the funniest and most biting
scenes in Rabelais are made up of lists of preposterous books that are
supposed to be part of a great library, and of pompous windbags
spouting off in incomprehensible language in front of equally pompous
“experts” who greet their colleagues with great applause.
The true Pantagruelians fall to the ground, holding their sides,
doubled over in laughter at the idiocy of human conceit. We need to
remember that when we laugh at these characters we are laughing at
ourselves.
A word on the translation. It is often said that Rabelais is
untranslatable. This is probably true. The importance of word play is
incalculable in Pantagruel, Gargantua, and the other
novels, and these puns and jokes can never be translated; like
Renaissance poetry and good wine, Rabelais’ language does not
always travel well. Yet, if there have been few successful
translations of Rabelais, these are among the best. Thomas
Urquhart’s translations of Pantagruel, Gargantua,
and the Third Book, published in 1653 and 1693, and Pierre Le
Motteux’s translations of the Fourth Book and the
Fifth Book published in 1694, have lost little of their comic
verve over the years. They capture the tone and verve of the original
French (Le Motteux was a Huguenot exile) better than some of the more
exact and more “learned” modern translations. If readers
trip over the language of the seventeenth century they should remember
that modern French readers also trip over the French of Rabelais, even
in contemporary editions. They should keep going, however, since
Rabelais’ French, even in translation, like Shakespeare’s
English, repays the effort needed to read it in kind, and then some.
Michael Randall is an associate professor of French and
Comparative Literature at Brandeis University.
