Gargantua and Pantagruel

  – the isthmus of the throat, like a hod;

  – the gullet, like a grape-picker’s flasket;

  – the stomach, like a pendant girdle;

  – the pylorus, like a two-pronged fork;

  – the windpipe, like a penknife;

  – throat, like a clew of oakum;

  – the lungs, like an amice;

  – the heart, like a chasuble;

  – the mediastinum, like a stone jug;

  – the pleura, like a surgeon’s crow’s-bill;

  – the arteries, like a Béarnese top-coat;

  – the diaphragm, like a Spanish cap;

  – the liver, like a mortising axe;

  – the veins, like an embroidery-frame;

  – the spleen, like a quail-lure;

  – the bowels, like a fishing-net;

  – the gall, like a cooper’s mallet;

  – the viscera, like a gauntlet;

  – the mesentery, like an abbatial mitre;

  – the jejunum of the small intestine, like a forceps;

  – the blind-gut of the large intestine, like belly-armour;

  – the colon, like a mustard pot;

  – the arse-gut, like a monastical sconce;

  – the kidneys, like a plasterer’s bowel;

  – the loins, like a padlock;

  – the ureters, like a chimney-hook;

  – the renal veins, like two syringes;

  – the spermatic cords, like a puff-pastry-cake;

  – the prostate, like a barrel of feathers;

  – the bladder, like a catapult;

  – the neck of the bladder, like the tongue of a bell;

  – the epigastrium, like an Albanian’s conical hat;

  – the peritoneum, like an arm-band;

  – the muscles, like a bellows;

  – the tendons, like a falconer’s glove;

  – the ligaments, like a money-bag;

  – the bones, like cream buns;

  – the marrow, like a beggar’s wallet;

  – the cartilages, like a tortoise from the moorlands of Languedoc;

  – the lymphatic glands, like a bill-hook;

  – the animal spirits, like a rain of heavy punches;

  – the vital spirits, like tweakings of the nose;

  – the boiling blood, Gnat-snapper;

  – the semen like a hundred tin-tacks (and his wet-nurse told me that when he was married to Mid-lent he spawned nothing but a number of pardons stuffed with locative adverbs, plus two-day fasts);

  – the memory which he had was like a game-bag;

  – his common-sense, like a droning;

  – his imagination, like a ring of bells;

  – his thoughts, like a murmuration of starlings;

  – his conscience, like a sedge of young herons leaving the nest;

  – his deliberations, like a bag of barley;

  – his repentance, like the yoked oxen hauling a double-cannon;

  – his enterprises, like the ballast of a galleon;

  – his understanding, like a tattered breviary;

  – his intellect, like snails slithering out of a bed of strawberries;

  – his will, like three walnuts in a bowl;

  – his desires, like six bales of holy-hay;

  – his judgement, like a shoe-horn;

  – his discernment, like a mitten;

  – his reason, like a cushion-stool.’

  The Anatomy of Quarêmeprenant as touching his external parts

  CHAPTER 31

  [Historically anatomy was just being newly developed by Vesalius and others. Quarêmeprenant continues to be shown as grotesque and unnatural.]

  ‘As for his external parts,’ Xenomanes continued, ‘Quarêmeprenant was slightly better proportioned, save for seven ribs which he had over and above the usual norm. He also had:

  – toes, like on a cross between a spinet and an organ;

  – nails, like a gimlet;

  – feet, like a guitar;

  – heels, like a mace;

  – soles, like an oil-lamp;

  – legs, like a decoy;

  – knees, like a stool;

  – thighs, like a steel lever for bending a cross-bow;

  – hips, like a brace-and-bit;

  – a belly, with a pointed beak like crakow shoes, button-hooked back on to the chest in an antiquarian style;

  – a navel, like a hurdy-gurdy;

  – a groin, like a tartlet;

  – a member, like a slipper;

  – balls, like a double leathern bottle;

  – the genitals, like a turnip;

  – the muscles of the spermatic cord, like a racket;

  – a perineum, like a whistle-pipe;

  – an arsehole, like a crystalline looking-glass;

  – the cheeks of his arse, like a harrow;

  – the loins, like a butter-dish;

  – a sacrum, like a cudgel;

  – a back, like a siege-sized crossbow;

  – spondyles, like a set of bagpipes;

  – ribs, like a spinning-wheel;

  – a sternum, like a baldachin;

  – shoulder-blades, like a mortar;

  – a chest, like a small hand-organ;

  – nipples, like the mouthpiece of a hunting-horn;

  – armpits, like a chessboard;

  – shoulders, like a handcart;

  – arms, like a great riding-hood;

  – fingers, like common-room andirons;

  – wrist-bones, like a pair of stilts;

  – forearms, as though fore-armed with sickles;

  – elbows, like rat-traps;

  – hands, like a curry-comb;

  – a neck, like a carousing-cup;

  – a throat, like a filter for mulled wine;

  – a larynx, like a barrel from which hang a pair of bronze goitres, handsome and harmonious, in the shape of an hour-glass;

  – a beard, like a lantern;

  – a chin, like a Saint-George’s mushroom;

  – ears, like a pair of mittens;

  – a nose, like cothurns fastened with escutcheons;

  – nostrils, like a babe’s bonnet;

  – eyebrows, like a dripping-pan; over the left one he has a mark in shape and size like a chamber-pot;)

  – eyelids, like a fiddle;

  – eyes, like a case for combs;

  – optic nerves, like a tinder-box;

  – a forehead, like a flat vault;

  – temples, like a watering-can;

  – cheeks, like a pair of clogs;

  – jaws, like a goblet;

  – teeth, like a long spear; of his milk-teeth you will find one at Coulanges-les-Royaux in Poitou, and two at La Brousse in Saintonge, above the cellar-door;

  – a tongue, like a harp;

  – a mouth, like a packhorse’s sumpter-cloth;

  – a face, incised (as though with a lancet) like a mule’s pack-saddle;

  – a head, like an alembic;

  – a cranium, like a game-bag;

  – cranial sutures, like that signet ring showing Saint Peter as Fisherman;

  – skin, like a sieving-cloth;

  – cranial hair, like a scrubbing-brush;

  – downy hair: as already described.’

  The physical features of Quarêmeprenant: continued

  CHAPTER 32

  [Laughter turns to satire. The formal list gives way to proverbial expressions (including some from the Adages of Erasmus). Amongst these proverbial expressions for useless and preposterous activities are, from the Adages, III, VII, XXXIX, ‘korubantian (to be mad)’; I, IV, LXXIV, ‘To fish on the air; to hunt in the sea’; I, III, LXXV, ‘To fix horns over the eyes’.

  The main debt is to the mythological fable of Physis (Nature) and Antiphysie (Anti-Nature), which stresses the danger of Antiphysie’s misleading analogies between the divine and the human. Pantagruel presents the fable as ancient, but it in fact comes directly from Celi
o Calcagnini, as does quite a lot of matter in this Fourth Book.

  At the very end of the Chapter the followers of Antiphysie are hypocrites of all sorts. In the midst of the usual creepy ones are found three powerful enemies who had each attacked Rabelais in print. They are treated as plurals, so becoming tribes not individuals. The ‘maniacal little Pistols’ refer to Guillaume Postel, an erratic genius who hated Rabelais and whose madness saved him from the stake; the ‘Calvins’ explain themselves (and serve as a reminder that many who admired Luther, as Rabelais did, might detest Calvin and his Eglise Réformée); ‘Putrid-herb’ is in Latin, Putherbus, a French Sorbonagre whose attacks on Rabelais in his book Theotimus were recent (1549) and extreme.]

  ‘It is,’ said Xenomanes, ‘a natural wonder to see the features of Quarêmeprenant, and to hear of them:

  – if he gobbed: it was basketfuls of wild artichokes;

  – if he wiped off his snot: it was salted eels;

  – if he dropped tears: it was carnard à l’orange;

  – if he shuddered: it was pasties of hare-meat;

  – if he sweated: it was cod in fresh butter;

  – if he belched: it was oysters-in-their-shells;

  – if he sneezed: it was full barrels of mustard;

  – if he coughed: it was vats of quince marmalade;

  – if he sobbed: it was ha’p’orths of watercress;

  – if he yawned: it was bowls of pea-soup;

  – if he sighed: it was smoked ox-tongues;

  – if he wheezed: it was hodfuls of green monkeys;

  – if he snored: it was pans of mashed peas;

  – if he frowned: it was larded pigs’ trotters;

  – if he spoke: it was coarse bureau-cloth from the Auvergne (far from being that crimson silk from which Parisatis wanted any words to be woven which were addressed to her son Cyrus, King of the Persians);

  – if he puffed: it was money-boxes for Indulgences;

  – if he blinked: it was waffles and wafers;

  – if he scolded: it was March tom-cats;

  – if he nodded with his head: it was carts with iron tires;

  – if he pouted: it was rub-a-dub-dub on a drum;

  – if he mumbled: it was morality plays for revelling law-clerks;

  – if he stamped about: it was referred payments and five-year graces;

  – if he drew backwards: it was salt-sea Worrycows;

  – if he dribbled: it was bake-house ovens;

  – if he grew hoarse: it was intricate morris-dances;

  – if he farted: it was brown cowhide gaiters;

  – if he quietly broke wind: it was booties of Cordova leather;

  – if he tickled himself: it was fresh precepts;

  – if he sang: it was peas in their pods;

  – if he shat: it was Saint-George’s mushrooms and morels;

  – if he puffed: it was cabbage in olive oil, Languedoc-style;

  – if he reflected: it was The Snows of Yesteryear;

  – if he worried: it was about the shaven and shorn;

  – if he gave something away: it was a penny for the lying embroiderer;

  – if he dreamt: it was of flying phalluses scrambling up walls;

  – if he went mad: it was lease-holders’ rent-books.

  ‘A curious case: he worked doing nothing: did nothing working; he corybanted as he slept: slept as he corybanted, keeping his eyes ever open like the hares in the fields of Champagne since he feared a night attack by his ancient foes the Chidlings. He laughed as he bit: bit as he laughed; ate nothing when fasting: fasting, ate nothing; he munched by suspicion and drank by imagination; he bathed on high steeples and dried himself off in rivers and ponds; he fished in the air and caught huge lobsters; he hunted in the depths of the sea, finding there ibises, bucks and chamois; he pecked out the eyes of all the crows which he trapped; he feared nought save his own shadow and the bleating of fat goats; on some days he pounded the pavements; he made complex puns on ceints, saints and sins apropos of the knotted-cords of the Cordeliers.56

  ‘He used his fist as a mallet; he also wrote prognostications and almanacs on ill-scraped parchment using his heavy writing-case.’

  ‘An elegant chap that!’ said Frère Jean. ‘That’s the man for me. Just the one I’m looking for. I intend to send him a note of defiance.’

  ‘There indeed is a strange and monstrous carcass of a man,’ said Pantagruel, ‘if man he should be called.

  ‘But you have recalled to my mind the forms and figures of Amodunt and Discordance.’

  ‘What forms did they have?’ asked Frère Jean. ‘God forgive me, but I’ve never heard of them.’

  ‘I shall tell you,’ replied Pantagruel, ‘what I have read about them amongst the fables of Antiquity: as her first brood, Physis (that is, Nature), being herself most fruitful and fertile, gave birth to Beauty and Harmony without carnal knowledge. Antiphysie, who has ever been the party hostile to Nature, at once envied such fair and honourable progeny and so, in rivalry, after copulating with Tellumon, gave birth to Amodunt and Discordance: they had heads which were spherical and entirely round like footballs, not gently compressed on either side as in the shape of human beings. Their ears were pricked up high like those of a donkey; their eyes, without eyebrows, were projected on bones resembling the bone of the heel and were as hard as a crab’s; their feet were round like tennis-balls whilst their arms and hands were twisted back towards their shoulders: and they walked on their heads, constantly turning cartwheels, arse over tip with feet in the air. And just as mother-monkeys, you know, think their little ones to be the most beautiful things in the world, Antiphysie praised the form of her offspring and strove to prove that it was more beautiful and more becoming than the form of the offspring of Physis, saying that to have feet and heads that are spherical and to roll along with a circular motion constitute the appropriate shape and the perfect gait, both suggestive of some participation in the Divine by which the heavens and all things eternal are caused to revolve. To have one’s feet in the air and the head down below was to imitate the Creator of the Universe, seeing that hair in Man is his roots as it were, and the arms his branches. Now trees are more properly bedded into the ground by their roots than they would be by their branches. By which exposition she claimed that her own offspring were more aptly and more closely likened to upright trees than were those of Physis, who resembled trees turned upside down.

  ‘As for the arms and the hands, she proved that it was more rational to twist towards the shoulders, because that part of the body should not be defenceless, seeing that the foreparts are appropriately furnished with teeth which a person can employ not only for masticating but also – without use of the hands – as a defence against things harmful. And thus, by the witness and warrant of brute beasts, she drew all the foolish and the stupid to her judgement and was a wonder to all the brainless folk bereft of good judgement and common intelligence. Since which time she spawned the Aping-males, Bigot-tails and Bacon-pappers, the maniacal little Pistols, the demoniacal Calvins (the impostors of Geneva) as well as the raging Putrid-herbs and the Mendicant Greedy-gutses, the Black-beetles, the Sycophants, the Cannibals and other monsters deformed and distorted from contempt for Nature.

  How Pantagruel descried a monstrous Physeter near the Ile Farouche

  CHAPTER 33

  [The name of this island (which means something like Wild Island) is inspired by the Disciple de Pantagruel.

  A leap from mystic fable to apparent reality. A physeter (‘blower’ in Greek, a word adopted also in Latin) is the cachalot of Pliny, which was differentiated from the smaller, better-known whale. Rabelais could well have seen it illustrated, differentiated from a whale, on the Carta Marina of Olaus Magnus (1539).

  The play on words over the name of Perseus is again in the spirit of Plato’s Cratylus, soon to be specifically mentioned (in Chapter 37). The original pun Perseus and Percé jus (pierced down) is kept as far as proved possible in English.
r />   The Pythagorean Y is the moral Y. (One of the arms of the moral Y is much broader than the other, facing the traveller with a choice: the broad arm leads to vice; the strait, to virtue. That aspect of the Pythagorean Y is scarcely relevant here, but we may be being prepared for the renewed interest in Pythagorean doctrines in Chapter 37.

  The line ‘celebrated flame-vomiting steeds of the Sun is a quotation from the first-century Latin poet Corippus.

  The fear and superstition of Panurge are again to the fore.

  There is a confused memory of the drowning of George Duke of Clarence in a butt of Malmsey.]

  About high noon we were approaching the Ile Farouche when Pantagruel descried from afar a huge monster of a physeter heading noisily straight for us, snorting and puffing itself up, rearing above the maintops of our boats and spouting ahead of it from its gullet water like a great river running down a mountain-side. Pantagruel pointed it out to the pilot and to Xenomanes.

  On the advice of the pilot the bugles of the Thalamege sounded: Keep a look out and Sail close to. At the sound of which, following naval discipline, all ships, galleons, frigates and liburnian galleys took up position in the formation of the Greek Y (the Pythagorean letter), such as found in an acute angle, or as cranes adopt in flight. Positioned at its cone and vertex was the Thalamege in valiant fighting trim.

  Frère Jean, gallant and most determined, climbed up to the foc’s’le with the gunners. Panurge started to blubber and moan even more than before: ‘Babillebabou,’ he said, ‘this is worse than ever! Let’s run away. By the Death of an Ox, that’s the Leviathan described by the noble prophet Moses in his life of that saintly man Job. He’ll gulp us all down like pills, men, boats and all: within his great hellish maw we shall be no more to him than a musk-scented sweet-meat in an ass’s gullet. There he is! Let’s flee away! Let’s reach the land. I believe he’s the very marine monster which was destined long ago to devour Andromeda. We are lost, all of us. O that now, to kill him, there were here some valiant Perseus.’

  ‘Pursue us: then pierced by me!’ Pantagruel replied.

  ‘God almighty! Set us free from the causes of fear!’ said Panurge. ‘When do you expect me to be frightened if not in evident danger?’

  ‘If such is your fated destiny as Frère Jean expounded the other day,’ said Pantagruel, ‘you ought to go in fear of Pyroeis, Eous, Aethon and Phlegon (the celebrated flame-vomiting steeds of the Sun which breathe fire from their noses): there is no need for you to feel any fear whatsoever of physeters, which merely spout water through their gills and nostrils. You will never be in danger of death from any water of theirs. By that element you will be protected rather and preserved, not troubled nor attacked.’