Rabelais already showed in Pantagruel his admiration for Plutarch’s Moral Works. Some twenty years later they come fully into their own in the Fourth Book. Several of the most profound pages Rabelais ever penned were written with his Plutarch open before him. Especially important is The Obsolescence of Oracles; important too are The Oracles at Delphi, with On Isis and Osiris and On the ‘Ei’ at Delphi.
Another very different work also contributed much. In Metz Rabelais read a strongly satirical work by Martin Luther, Of the Papacy of Rome, Constructed by the Devil. It mocks an idolatrous respect for the Vatican and for papal power, buttressed as it is by the Decretals, edicts issued on the sole authority of popes. Some of the Decretals were already known to be forged. (They had misled Thomas Aquinas.) Luther also tells how zealous, generous boobies are sneeringly called ‘Good Christians’ by the unbelievers who, for him, dominate the papal Curia.
Rabelais transmutes Luther’s bleak satire into the pure gold of the moral laughter which dominates the episode of the Papimanes. Far away on their island, isolated in zealous and intolerant ignorance, they innocently, gullibly, cruelly – and maniacally – worship the very objects of Luther’s mockery. They worship the wrong god and venerate the wrong scriptures.
Cardinal Odet de Châtillon and others had hoped to persuade Henri II to break with Rome in 1551–2 and to set up a national Church of France, not unlike the Church of England. He met Rabelais and, assuring him of his own support and of that of his king, persuaded him to write under his protection. Safe at last, Rabelais could write as he dared. And in the Fourth Book – a book protected by a Royal privilège and proudly prefaced by an Epistle to the Cardinal Odet de Châtillon in person – he dared a great deal.
Another book to influence him was Plato’s Cratylus. Before he had studied the Cratylus Rabelais worked within the standard linguistic ideas of Aristotle: to speak is natural, but no language is natural. Except for onomatopoeias, words are sounds on to which meanings have been arbitrarily imposed. For Plato in the Cratylus words are more complex. Onomatopoeias, for Plato as for Aristotle, convey their sense in their sound, but the ‘true’ meaning of some words is to be sought in their etymologies. (Etymology involved seeking out the etymon, the word’s true meaning.) In the roots of at least some words lie half-veiled truths.
Platonic ‘ideas’ dwell as paroles (‘words’) in the heavenly Manor of Truth. At long intervals some of those words drip down like catarrh on to our snotty world. When they do so, they contain divine revelations. And they will providentially do so ‘world without end’ – until, that is, the ‘end of the age’. Some authors would have made heavy weather of such profundities: Rabelais turns them into part of a laughing venture of discovery. We discover areas of mystical truth. We learn how mankind must cooperate with grace. And all this in a comic book, with Dionysiac laughter never far away.
Love links Heaven and earth but our fallen world is driven by Signor Belly, by fear of hunger. We are conducted to the Manor of Truth, and then to the Manor of Virtue, where our guide is a famous myth from Hesiod which tells how the upward path is laborious, rough and stony, yet Virtue, once reached, dwells in smooth and pleasant uplands. The elevating powers of wine are praised. The ways of an inspired Pantagruel and of a self-loving, squittering Panurge are contrasted. Pantagruel becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided in his wisdom. In the purest comic tradition Panurge remains unchanged, cheekily fixed in his filth and folly. He now remains for ever where Gargantua the boy giant once was: delighting in the products of his anus. And the book, like its predecessors, ends up in the air.
All four books by Rabelais sport with signs. Signs and gestures may be real (natural) or conventional. From Pantagruel onwards Rabelais laughs at those who confuse self-evident, natural signs (such as pangs of hunger, messing one’s trousers, as well as cocking a snook and suggesting coitus with one’s fingers or pinching one’s nose whilst pointing at someone) with signs which have conventional meanings. Conventional signs have to be learnt. They are understood only by those who know the conventions. The last book that Rabelais sent to the printers before he died ends with signs: Frère Jean des Entommeures is ready to make entommeures (mincemeat) of his foes: his very name is a sign of his bravery. The long-delayed laughter of Pantagruel is a sign of his wisdom and humanity. That Panurge has messed himself again is a sign of his servile fear, and the faeces which he delights in are signs of perhaps diabolical error.
The Fifth Book
Rabelais died little over a year after his Fourth Book of 1552. But his name sold supposititious books, something he complained of during his lifetime. In 1549 some pages had been passed off as a Fifth Book of Pantagruel. (Rediscovered in 1900, it convinced The Times for a while.) New books continued to be published under his name after his death. One is the Isle Sonante (the Ringing Isle) of 1562. Most but not all of it is included, with some variants, in another, which purports to be the Fifth and Last Book of Pantagruel of 1564.
It is essentially the Fifth and Last Book of 1564, not the Fifth Book of 1549, which has for centuries been printed together with the other four in the works of Rabelais. (There is also an incomplete manuscript of it, not in the hand of Rabelais, which gives variant readings.) Some think this Fifth Book is based on papers left by Rabelais at his death. (No such papers have been found. Not one page. Not one line. But authors’ manuscripts were not often treasured then as they are now.) Others think it has nothing to do with Rabelais, that none of it bears his hallmark, and much of it certainly does not. That is my judgement. At all events, the complete book cannot be by Rabelais as it stands. More than a hint of its arranger (and part author) is given at the end of the first edition. There we find a poem signed NATVRE QVITE.
NATVRE QVITE is an anagram of Jean Turquet. Jean de Mayerne, called Turquet, was a doctor from a solid Piedmontese family. (French was the language of many in the Piedmont, long the citadel of religious reformers.) One Turquet – of the same family – eventually came to England to escape religious persecution, and became a well-known London physician.
The Fifth Book is religiously aware, with ‘reformed’ tendencies. It displays a knowledge of medicine. It also moves into the domain of the transmutation of metals, and of curiously mystical themes more obscurantist than profound. But, by Rabelais or not, it has been printed with the authentic works of Rabelais from the sixteenth century onwards.
Other great authors drag along a train of doubtful works. It may not matter much, but it can. An authentic play by Shakespeare is not likely to be interpreted in the light of a doubtful one. In the case of Rabelais, however, it matters a great deal. Ever since 1564 readers of Rabelais have been presented with copies of his works which include a book, published a decade after his death, which claims to round off his writings. It brings the heroes back to Touraine. It tells of the end of the quest for the ‘Word’ of the Dive Bouteille, of that ‘Sainted Bottle’ dwelling in a mystical Never-never Land. Some read back into the four Books the often cryptic meanings they find in the Fifth. For them, Rabelais’ last word is essentially Trinck (Drink!), the ‘Word’ of the Dive Bouteille. And here Trinck risks turning the real, soul-uplifting wine of the wingéd Bacchus of the Fourth Book into something other: a quest for something symbolized by wine – knowledge, say, or even enlightenment. The Fifth Book is included in this translation, but its various endings leave the reader with a very different savour from that of the end of the Fourth Book.
RABELAIS, SCRIPTURE AND HUMANIST FUN
Rabelais was a learned scholar and readers expect to be impressed. In parallel, at a popular level, restaurants named Gargantua or the Moutons de Panurge lead readers of Rabelais to expect to find in him a delight in lashings of rich food and wine. They often do, though habitual gorging and swilling may be greeted in Rabelais with wry laughter, even at times with indignation. An occasional banquet, Shrovetide revels and rustic stuffing of tripe in mid-winter are a delight and presented as such: idly spending the livelong year on glut
tony and crapulence is another matter, as the Fourth Book makes crystal clear through its sometimes remarkably bitter comedy.
What does surprise many is the importance of Scripture in the four Books, Scripture exploited for both serious and comic ends. Yet Rabelais was an ordained priest. He lived much of his adult life amongst churchmen. Erasmus brought both the Bible and Greek thought alive for him. Clement of Alexandria had taught generations that what the law was to the Jews philosophy was to the Greeks: Old Testament religion and Greek thought were both inspired tutors. Rabelais accepted that, but his own Erasmian theology was in happy harmony with Dionysiac elements. Erasmus had no sympathy for them; nor did he appreciate ‘monkish’ jokes derived from Scripture twisted out of context. Rabelais did.
In Pantagruel and Gargantua especially we find plenty of what is traditionally called ‘monkish’ humour. Monks, men living closely with other men, often cut off from women and concerned year in, year out, with the daily round of liturgy, psalms and Scripture, turned to liturgy and Holy Writ, for comfort, certainly, but also for their jests, some of them remarkably coarse. ‘Unto thee I lift up’ is the incipit of two psalms: it is also a ‘monkish’ term for the rampant penis. ‘Charity,’ we are told, ‘covers a multitude of sins’ (I Peter 4:8). So does a monastic frock. Christ on the Cross called out, ‘I thirst.’ So does the tipsy cleric in Gargantua. For pages at a time Pantagruel is, in the spirit of Shrovetide, a parody of Scripture with plenty of Mardi Gras humour. Rabelais’ wider comedy remained anchored in his grasp of the gulf which separates words from deeds, bums from minds, rhetorical nonsense or smooth-speaking hypocrisy from positive action.
Moral comedy needs its triggers to be clear, well-defined or intuitively grasped. Once that is so, literally anything can be turned into subjects of laughter: no topic is too awesome. To leave everything to prayer is lazy, and can be turned into a subject of laughter. To blubber instead of working hard is ignoble, and can be turned into a subject of laughter. To prefer your bum to your mind is odd, and can be turned into a subject of laughter. To worship human beings or objects is idolatrous, and can be turned into a subject of laughter. To interpret words and other signs wrongly is misleading, and can be turned into a subject of laughter. As for cruelty, in a farce it almost always is the subject of laughter. Both birth and death are veiled with awe: stripped of their veils and skilfully trivialized, they too can be turned into subjects of laughter. Rabelais gives his readers clear pointers. One may be simple and intuitive; the next may be a saying from, say, Saint Paul entwined with words from Plato. Rabelais presents them firmly in ways which satisfy. And at least in the background there is always room for pantagruelism – for comradeship, for friendship, for wine drunk in good company and for Dionysiac fun. More than mere smiles lie within an adage such as ‘He is no dithyrambic who drinks but water’. Wine both delights and inspires.
There is a progression in the use of Scripture by Rabelais. The prompting came from Erasmus. In Pantagruel Rabelais cites Holy Writ as he had learnt to do as a Franciscan, associating type and antitype. For example, at the beginning of Pantagruel an amused reference to the Cain and Abel of the Old Testament leads on to a quiet allusion to ‘the blood of the righteous’ of the New. (Most readers nowadays probably overlook the linkage.)10 Throughout Pantagruel one finds similar links being made. Not normally however in the later books. There Rabelais is more likely to link Plato and the Gospel, as he does for the first time in the Almanac for 1535. The Third Book links Paul with Lucian, and Roman Law with Lucian-esque laughter. The Fourth Book is the triumph of Renaissance syncretism (unifying and reconciling the ancient world with mystical truth as Rabelais saw it). Paul is to the fore, but close at hand are Aesop, Plato, Pythagoras and Plutarch.
The fun with Scripture is closely paralleled by fun at the expense of great philosophers. An earnest moral saying of Plato, cited cogently by Cicero, may be turned on its head, only to be cited solemnly later. Platonic ‘ideas’ or Pythagorean triangles are objects of fun before they become matters of deeper import. As Rabelais read Plato, Socrates made folly (or madness) not ignorance the trigger of laughter. And madness comes in myriad guises. Solomon said so: ‘The number of fools is infinite.’ Avicenna, the much-admired and much-studied Muslim philosopher and physician, says virtually the same. So there are plenty of idiots to laugh at, some of them very grand indeed. The Third Book lists dozens of them when ringing the changes on fools and folly.11
READ RABELAIS THROUGH, OR DIP INTO HIM?
Not everybody finds it best to start with page one of Pantagruel and to read solidly on to the end of the Fourth Book (or the Fifth). When Rabelais was on the syllabus of virtually every university in the United Kingdom, some prescribed only ‘Rabelais, Gargantua: from Chapter 23 to the end’ (beginning with the peasant strife leading to Picrochole’s war). That may still to be a good place to start. Others find the Fourth Book the best to begin with. Each book can be read by itself. Others like just dipping in. Many do, keeping him as a bed-side book. Yet in the end, and when the time is ripe, there is nothing quite like starting with page one of Pantagruel and reading on. We enter then into a wise world of kaleidoscopic laughter.
THE ORDER OF THE BOOKS
Pantagruel (1532?) appeared well before Gargantua (early 1535 or autumn 1534). In editions it is normally placed after it. That order confounds the development of the art of Rabelais from book to book. Here Pantagruel comes first. The other works too appear in order of publication. However, the established general title, Gargantua and Pantagruel has not been switched to Pantagruel and Gargantua. To do so would be pedantic.
Rabelais kept Gargantua and Pantagruel apart from his overtly learned works, which are often in complex Renaissance Latin. He also wrote French works long classed as minor. Only his Pantagrueline Prognostication and his Almanacs are given here. The other works remain little frequented by the gentle reader. Photocopiers and scanners make them easily and legally available in English from W. F. Smith’s translation of Rabelais (long out of copyright): his scholarly, nineteenth-century English serves them well, but they add little to pantagruelism and its wise kaleidoscopic laughter whilst adding much to the price of the book – and to its bulk (some eighty-seven pages in the Smith edition).12
THE FOOTNOTES
Editions of Rabelais can be crushing, with notes taking up more room than the text. Here the footnotes are devoted mainly to variant readings. The sources of Rabelais are given in the introductions to each chapter only when they add to the pleasure or understanding. One exception is made: Erasmus. He is frequently mentioned for his Adages. Few books have ever had a greater influence on their times. Now that they are available in English, published by the University of Toronto Press, they are more accessible.13
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Specific debts and the editions translated are mentioned in the Introductions to each Book of Rabelais.
When it appeared in 1991, I read Donald Frame’s translation of Rabelais but have not regularly done so since. It was better to work separately. That great scholar stayed in my home twice and we talked about Montaigne and Rabelais. He wrote to me during the last years of his life, years marked by great suffering stoically borne. His letters were a pleasure to receive, often painful to read, but always evoking affection and admiration. Had he lived he would have eliminated from his translation, as posthumously published, the gaps, errors and misreadings of his manuscript. He was a meticulous workman, a warm friend and a great scholar.
Kazuo Watanabe’s work in Tokyo was also a constant encouragement, as he was himself during his lifetime.
My own approach to Rabelais and his text is one that colleagues will recognize. Much will always be owed to those who laid the foundations of Rabelaisian scholarship from the eighteenth century onwards. And good work is still being done.
A great debt is acknowledged to the incomplete Edition Critique of Abel Lefranc and his team. Another to the individual texts of Rabelais published by Droz of Geneva. W. F. Smith’
s translation is a mine of ideas gratefully acknowledged. Guy Demerson’s edited translation of Rabelais into modern French has been a joy to consult. Mireille Huchon’s very full Rabelais for la Pléiade is not easy to handle but is a true cornucopia.
I first read Rabelais as a soldier in the classic seventeenth-century translation of Urquhart and Motteux. I have not, however, sought its guidance here. It is at times a recasting of Rabelais rather than a translation. Its rich English is bound to its time, and for that very reason remains a joy to read for its own self. Any echoes of it here (if there are any) are attributable to long-rooted memory. The only phrase that I know I have taken from it is Frère Jean’s unforgettable refrain, ‘Breviary stuff. Other translations I have simply avoided for practical reasons.
It was Paul Keegan who first proposed that I translate Montaigne and then Rabelais for Penguin. I owe him many thanks for two decades of pleasant and rewarding work.
My greatest debts are to the many who, over the years, have read Rabelais with me round a table. Truly a joint journey of discovery, leading to a deeper understanding of the Renaissance and to many a good laugh.