LAUGHTER AND BOOKS
Rabelais drew upon the world around him for his smiles and laughter, but he also drew heavily upon all his learned disciplines, law and medicine included. Those who urged Henri II in the 1540s to persuade Rabelais to write a sequel to his Pantagruel and Gargantua were ‘the learned men of the Kingdom’. William Hazlitt, the eighteenth– and early nineteenth-century critic and essayist, captures a vital aspect of Rabelais’ art when he imagined him
with an eye languid with an excess of mirth, his lip quivering with a new-born conceit, and wiping his beard after a well-seasoned jest, with his pen held carelessly in his hand, his wine-flagons and his books of law, of school divinity, and of physic before him, which were his jest-books, whence he drew endless stores of absurdity; laughing at the world and enjoying it by turns, and making the world laugh with him again for the last three hundred years, at his teeming wit and his own prolific follies. Even to those who have never read his works, the name of Rabelais is a cordial for the spirits, and the mention of it cannot consist with gravity or spleen!’4
It is a pleasing picture but a partial one. All his special fields required sound Latin, but Rabelais was also at home with the culture of those who knew nothing but French. One of the works he most often evokes is Maître Pathelin, a French farce laughing at lawyers which was performed at Court by Songe-creux, a great comic actor. Rabelais was also at home in the world of student farces and the tumultuous world of the Latin Quarter. He knew what bawdy songs were sung in college, town and royal palace. He delighted in the pranks associated with Tyl Eulenspiegel or the François Villon of life or legend. In Pantagruel he can show that he had read More’s Utopia but also enjoyed the talk and jests of simple folk in town and country.
Anyway, not all the tomes that he read in Greek and Latin were grave and solemn. A major influence on him was Lucian, the late Greek mocker whom Erasmus too had taken as a model. Works of that grinning Greek (the joy of many a subtle writer) were being translated into Latin by well-known scholars and so made widely accessible. Erasmus translated some. So did Thomas More. So did the wise and tolerant Melanchthon, the Lutheran Preceptor of Germany. And so did Rabelais, while still a Franciscan. (His translation has been lost.) Already called the French Democritus, Rabelais became the French Lucian. Lucian is strongly present in each of his works. Yet for some critics of his day (despite Erasmus, Melanchthon and the like), even to admire Lucian suggested more than a hint of atheism: had not Lucian mocked Christians in his dialogue The Passing of Peregrinus?
Rabelais also became acquainted with the laughter found in ancient Greek or Latin comedies and Latin satires. He accepted (with most who wrote about laughter, many of whom were medical men) that laughter is the ‘property of Man’. Laughter is an activity that humans share with no other creature. It is ‘proper’ to them. It defines the human being. It divides mankind from all the rest of creation. When Rabelais calls someone an agelast (a sad sobersides, a non-smiler, a non-laugher) the judgement is harsh and dehumanizing. For both his kings Rabelais was worthy of the highest accolade as defined by the Roman poet Horace: he ‘mixed the useful and the sweet’. He is ‘sweet’ (enjoyable) but also ‘useful’ (a sound moralist).5 Rabelais is a moralist in the French sense, often more inclined to paint folly than to inveigh against it (though he can do that too). He is a moralist who shows up human follies with humour, and who commends virtue in ways that make us want to go on reading him.
Such an author cannot be ignored, for he often stirs up great controversies. Rabelais was troublesome from the start. Each book of his at once provoked a storm for, besides his many admirers, he had powerful enemies who would willingly have burnt his books (and him as well). It required courage to take on the Sorbonne (the main body of French theologians), the Vatican and the many who opposed his ideas and those of his patrons. None of his books quietly glided into prominence. Pantagruel was no sooner published when would-be censors impotently condemned it. When Gargantua was being written, Paris was in turmoil over heresy, with religious riots firmly suppressed. Rabelais had to flee from Lyons to Italy in January 1535. After the Third Book (1546) he fled to Metz, then a free German city. Censors tried to suppress his Fourth Book of 1552. They failed, but rumour suggested (wrongly, it seems) that he was in serious trouble. In 1562, the Council of Trent put him on their Index of Forbidden Books as a ‘heretic of the first class’. But he went on being read. And discreetly published too, openly abroad, or in France under false addresses. (Molière assumes that his audience has read him.)
THE BOOKS IN TURN
Pantagruel
Each of the books has its own very distinct personality. Behind each one lie other books besides Lucian. Behind the first book, Pantagruel, there lies an anonymous little French chapbook, The Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Great and Enormous Giant Gargantua. (Rabelais’ own Gargantua came later.) Rabelais draws on it for his own ‘chronicle’ of funny giants, and also on Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore and on the curious tales told by Merlin Coccaïe (Folengo) in his Macaronics (verse written in a fusion of Italian and Latin). Rabelais also found his way into a work then available only in Hebrew, The Pirkei of Rabbi Eliezar, many of whose laughs derive from Old Testament stories. It supplied him with some of his best Scriptural fun, above all with the giant riding astride Noah’s Ark and guiding it with his feet.
Before Rabelais, Penthagruel (as he was sometimes spelt) was a sea imp who shovelled salt into the throats of drunkards to increase their thirst. ‘Penthagruel,’ men said, ‘had them by the throat’. Rabelais, writing towards the end of a dreadful four-year-long drought, turned that imp into a Gallic giant. He is now as huge as the legendary Gargantua. Pantagruel’s name now is cheekily derived from Pan, all, and gruel, thirst!
Pantagruel is a Renaissance book of Twelfth Night and Mardi Gras merriment, when men and women in Court, town and village laughed for a while at their dearest beliefs. (Drunkenness is fun for a Twelfth Night Toby Belch: it is not so in normal times for a Michael Cassio, nor, indeed, for a Falstaff.) Pantagruel finds some of its best laughter in the Bible. Pantagruel is at times a sort of Shrovetide Christ, a comic parallel to the Jesus of Scripture.
Pantagruel is also an amused parody of tales of chivalry. A book of legal laughter, too. (The very title-page of Pantagruel in its first edition is done up to look like a Latin law-book.) It also had its say on education. More boldly, it laughs at Magistri Nostri (‘Our Masters’ as the theology dons were proudly called). Such laughter greatly increases in the second edition. In several pages Pantagruel is strikingly evangelical in tone. Rabelais laughs at the rights and privileges claimed by the University of Paris. (French kings did not always like those entrenched freedoms.) He trod on a great many toes, but his enemies had to work within legal constraints. No record of any legally enforceable condemnation of Pantagruel survives from the time of its first success. But in 1533 the Sorbonne had taken measures against The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, a committed, evangelical poem by Marguerite de Navarre, the king’s sister. With the help of his troops the king soon put a stop to that! The Reverend Dr Jean Leclerc, trying to excuse his conduct, made reference to a mix-up with ‘obscene’ books: Pantagruel and The Forest of Cunts. Rabelais tacked bitter laughs against such censoring hypocrites on to the end of Pantagruel. He made wry remarks about them in Gargantua too, referring back to Pantagruel. The only surviving copy of the first edition of Pantagruel bears clear signs of a censor’s pen. Pantagruel contains jokes about Scripture which horrified some. (Tastes were changing towards a sustainedly solemn treatment of Holy Writ.) Rabelais had dared to laugh at institutions such as the Sorbonne which could do him harm. He soon felt it wise to cut out or tone down some of his boldest gibes. Later editions of Pantagruel (and of Gargantua too) suffer for that prudence; that is why it is the text of the first editions of them (with later variants) that are translated here.6
Gargantua
Gargantua (early 1535 or autumn 1534) forms a marked contrast with Pan
tagruel. Pantagruel pretended to be a popular chap-book: Gargantua is afraid of being taken for one. Pantagruel revels in allusions to tall tales of chivalry: Gargantua evokes Plato from its very first lines. Gargantua is presented in its Prologue as a book which resembles Socrates. Both are sileni, a term drawn from Silenus, the jester of the gods, the gross, ugly old devotee of Bacchus. Sileni are presented as little graven images with a god to be found hidden inside them when they are opened up, or as pharmacists’ boxes decorated on the outside with grotesques or, say, an ugly old flute-player. But open them up and look within and you find something precious, something divine. So too for Socrates and for Gargantua. Socrates, called a silenus by Alcibiades, hid divinely prompted wisdom within his ugly exterior. Gargantua may well look ugly on the outside, printed as it was in old-fashioned gothic type, yet, inside, it treats of ‘the highest hidden truths and the most awesome mysteries touching upon our religion as well as upon matters of State and family life’. By referring thus to the Sileni Rabelais is, from the outset, underlining his debt to Erasmus. With another echo of Erasmus, Gargantua is likened to Pythagorean symbols. Superficially such symbols appear to be odd and ridiculous, yet – like Gargantua – they contain within them ‘precepts for right living.’7
In Pantagruel the ideal education produced a bookish scholar with his head crammed full. In Gargantua we are shown how a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by paternal ignorance, crapulous old crones and dirty, syphilitic dons from the Sorbonne, can be turned into a Christian knight, cultured and healthy, trained to excel in the arts of peace and war. Gargantua touches on politics, including mockery of the dreams of world conquest of the Emperor Charles V. (His capture and ransoming of François I at the defeat of Pavia in 1525 still haunted the French nobility.) Gargantua – partly as a reply to a rash little book which laid down the meanings of colours in heraldry – devotes space to topics dear to the aristocracy: heraldry, emblems (then growing into a cult), the true and rational meanings of colours, the education of princes, the avoiding of war whilst prudently preparing for it, and the fighting of battles. Plans are laid for an ideal lay abbey, housing the rich, young, elegant and well-born sons and daughters of the nobility. Protected from the wickedness of the world, they live their lives free from what Saint Paul calls ‘the yoke of bondage’. (But ideal freedom allows for great conformity in Thélème, as it did for the Stoics.)
After his uproariously mad education the young Gargantua is purged of insanity by Dr Rabelais and brought up in tempered freedom. The education he is given may have been first conceived as a model for the sons of François I; released in 1530 from their restraint in Madrid as hostages of the Emperor Charles V. (They had been held as pledges for their father’s ransom.) The king, fearing that their sense of princely independence might have been compromised, was determined to have them educated in freedom. Rabelais shows (a little late perhaps, in print) how ideally it could be done.
The reformed Gargantua raises fewer laughs: he was far more laughable as a boy giant obsessed with his hobby-horses and his bum. Rabelais accepted the maxim ‘Contraries juxtaposed to contraries shine forth more clearly’. The education of the giant is such a juxtaposition. The young giant delights in suave ways of wiping his bottom: the reformed giant goes modestly to the jakes with his tutor, cleansing body and soul together. From then on it is Frère Jean, ‘the Monk’, who arouses our laughter. He represents the triumph of the constructive deeds of even the coarse-mouthed over purely passive verbal piety. He is eventually revealed as acting out a parable: he comforts the afflicted and succours the needy. And he guards the Abbey vineyard. What matters is not verbiage but right actions. Merely verbal piety turns prayers into magic spells. As a Franciscan Rabelais had learnt from Saint Bonaventura that justification lies partly with grace and partly in our free-will. Much depends on what we do. God’s grace must not be received in vain. That is a recurring theme for Rabelais.8
Gargantua appeared during a long period of social unrest. Already in 1532–3, riots in Paris had been provoked by the preachings of evangelical clerics supported by Marguerite de Navarre and other great persons. Was the mob egged on by placards posted up by agents-provocateurs disguised as masked revellers and acting for the Sorbonne? It would seem so. But worse was to come. On the night of 17–18 October 1534, densely argued placards were posted up in Paris. We now know that they had been printed in Neuchâtel for followers of Zwingli, the Zurich reformer. The Roman Mass was attacked in them as idolatrous. Suppressed, they appeared again (13 January 1535) when the royal reaction stunned the kingdom. Men and women were burnt. Printing was forbidden. A public act of expiation led by François I suggested that the enemies of liberalism had won. Yet within weeks the king, urged on by the Du Bellays, kept Noël Béda, the fiery and illiberal Syndic of the Sorbonne, under restraint and invited Melanchthon to Paris to discuss reform with selected theologians. (Melanchthon was every moderate’s favourite Lutheran. He was invited to England too by Henry VIII.) Unfortunately he was forbidden to leave German lands, but for a while the Du Bellays had triumphed. Gargantua is markedly favourable to the causes of the Du Bellays and to the eirenic teachings of Melanchthon. But before any invitation was sent to Melanchthon, Rabelais felt obliged (in January 1535) to abandon his post as physician in the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyons and to flee from France. Laughter in Gargantua is not aroused by a man living an uneventful and comfortable existence.
The Third Book of Pantagruel
Over ten years were to pass before Rabelais was persuaded to publish his Third Book (1546). It is dedicated to the enraptured ‘spirit’ (or ‘mind’) of Queen Marguerite de Navarre, who was a deeply religious woman, both mystical and evangelical. (Rabelais treats her as a contemplative whose mind, caught away to Heaven in rapture, has to be tempted back to earth in order to witness the joyous deeds of his new book.) The Third Book is his masterpiece of philosophical comedy.
In form and matter it is an elegant, learned, comic Renaissance work. It too has a book behind it: Lucian’s To One Who Said to Him ‘You Are a Prometheus in Words’ in which Lucian defends his fusion of dialogue with comedy: before him, dialogue was the domain of philosophy not laughter. Rabelais quotes him and follows him. The Third Book begins as a comic, philosophical dialogue between Pantagruel and Panurge. For the first twelve chapters, nobody else is present. Both characters are fundamentally changed: Pantagruel is now a giant in wisdom, Panurge, an ageing fool, progressively driven deeper into melancholy madness by his yearning to take a wife and his terror of being cuckolded, beaten and robbed if he does so. The stage is set by Panurge’s ingeniously perverse praise of debts and debtors. The rest of the book too is taken up with monologue, dialogue and sometimes with comic exchanges like those heard between actors on the trestles in farces such as Fathelin. It is a feast of rhetoric and dialectic, twin subjects of study in Renaissance schools and colleges.
The framework of the book owes much to legal doctrines about how to deal with ‘perplex cases’ – legal cases where the law reaches an impasse. The advice of Roman Law is to follow two intertwining courses: to consult acknowledged experts and harmonize their opinions; and then, when (in the technical legal phrase) ‘there is no other way’, to seek counsel from dice, divination and lots. Rabelais runs through the gamut of methods of divination and of Renaissance wisdom and knowledge, all of which, as he expounds them, are wreathed in smiles or shot through with the sudden glory of laughter. It is all the more amusing in that a decision to marry or not should not be a ‘perplex case’ (as Thomas More remarked elsewhere with a smile). Panurge ought to make up his own mind about marriage.
But there are such things in law as truly ‘perplex cases’: cases which defy a clear, rational decision, cases where the law itself is clear but its application is not. The Third Book reveals how to deal with them in accordance with Roman Law and Christian simplicity.
Rabelais is indebted throughout to both André Tiraqueau and Guillaume Budé, the summits of French judicial studies
. The Third is the most difficult of the four books. For many it is also the most rewarding. Its comedy is complex and profound. Such a book cannot please everyone: Rabelais tells us that his public found its ‘wine’ – here, its more easily accessible comedy – little but good. They preferred it to be plentiful and good. He took the hint.
The Fourth Book of Pantagruel
After the Third Book Rabelais, despite his royal privilège, prudently slipped away to Metz, a free city, a Lutheran city. Life for him there was marked by a degree of poverty. He had made more enemies, kept powerful friends, and gained more. And in Metz he was already reading Lutheran books destined to enrich his art and thought.
The Fourth Book has a puzzling history. In 1548 a shorter Fourth Book appeared, clearly unfinished and misshapen. It has a well-written Prologue, which is not that of the 1552 Fourth Book. It ends up in the air, in the middle of a sentence. Most striking of all, it does not sport its royal privilège. To fill up his space the printer padded out the book with old woodcuts drawn from stock. Had he somehow got his hands on an incomplete manuscript of Rabelais’ future book? Was it printed without the author’s knowledge or consent? It might seem so. But it remains a puzzle.
The Fourth Book of 1552 is a very different matter. The Rabelais of the full Fourth Book has greatly profited from his reading, some of it gleaned in Italy and in German lands. In Italy, with the Seigneur de Langey, he had read the works of Celio Calcagnini, who was long judged the best mythographer of the Renaissance. Unfortunately he wrote in Latin, so his myths are now all but unknown. His Works were a mine for Rabelais (and many others). Under his direct influence Rabelais was inspired to invent and develop myths which stretch across the world and into the heavens. He now begins to talk of his books as ‘pantagruelic mythologies’. But even when plunged into works of erudition, Rabelais never overlooked more popular writings. For his Fourth Book he borrowed from a little work which had appropriated some of his characters, and tells of a sea-voyage, of Chidlings and of a giant Bringuenarilles. Thanks to Rabelais it has earned its modest place in literary history.9