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For French Language Day: On Rabelais, Gargantua and You
It’s been a while since I’ve trotted out my Trav S.D. Theme Song, as its been a while since I’ve performed anything, what with all manner of ills befalling our nation since, oh, I’ll pluck the random year of 2016. But I’ll be reviving it soon as part of a new burst of upcoming activity and when I do you’ll note a reference in its lyrics to the great French writer François Rabelais (ca. 1483-1553). I say (with hope in my heart) that you’ll note it however only because you’ll have read this article. I assure you that no one has ever noted it or remarked upon it before.
Rabelais has been called the most unread of all of writers of his stature, and his stature is as THE WRITER WHO GAVE US THE MODERN FRENCH LANGUAGE. Hence, this post timed for French Language Day, March 20, since no one knows precisely when he was born.
Never heard of Rabelais? Crack a book. While you’re at it, crack two books, one of which is a set of encyclopedias. (Rabelais invented the word “encyclopedia”, by the way). Chateaubriand composed a short-list of “mother geniuses”, authors so great (and so fortuitously timed) that they ended up giving birth to entire national literatures. For the Greeks, it’s Homer; for the English, its Shakespeare; for Italy, Dante; for Spain, Cervantes. Most of them, you’ll note, arrived during the Renaissance. If he’d come a little later (they were contemporaries), Chateaubriand might have cited Goethe for the Germans, as well. (Don’t know who Chateaubriand was? Oh, FFS, crack THREE books). Anyway, to belabor the point, for France it’s Rabelais, and like I say, compared with all of those others, very few have read him. And (apart from scholars) most of those who have, like me, really haven’t, because we have really only experienced him at second hand, through translations and interpretations by literary critics, and so forth. I love the idea of him, but it’s beyond doubtful that I’ll ever have the capacity to drill down to his depths because it would require a lifetime of scholarship on that one task, and I have other things to do. Not better, just other.
Anyway, I’ve been unfair to you, as well, For it’s almost certainly not your fault that, unlike most or all of those other authors, you weren’t assigned to read any Rabelais at school. I wasn’t either. Rabelais’s two principle works, the novels Gargantua and Pantagruel, are overflowing with the sort of content that would make maintaining decorum in any high school humanities class completely impossible. I’m talking about rude stuff. Poo-poo. Pee-pee. Farts. Naughty body parts. Uncouth acts. Bowels and tripe. Drunkenness. Lewd and infantile behavior. In this respect Rabelais resembles some other authors who do get read from time to time in schools in spite of their occasional detours into questionable areas, Chaucer and Boccaccio. But picture Chaucer and Boccaccio if their books were almost ENTIRELY composed of the naughty parts.
“Well, that sounds like garbage!” some might say, and better men and women than you have said that very thing throughout the centuries. The difficulty with that point of view is, well, (see above) his literary genius. It was HOW he wrote, and what the work added up to. He coined words, invented them, repurposed other ones, played with them and in the doing somehow laid the foundation for how the French write and speak since his time. You may not have heard of Rabelais, but I imagine you have encountered the name Gargantua or the word “gargantuan”. He invented THOSE. (And, in the sad case that you you don’t know those, perhaps you recall “Gargamel” from TheSmurfs? She’s named after Gargantua’s mother. Haha, now you’re convinced of his genius). Authors like the ones we’ve named are like explorers, or, even more aptly, like Adam, who walked around the Garden and Eden and named everything for the first time. Still more aptly, it’s as though the man who invented the piano also turned out to play it better than anyone else, and then composed its greatest music. It’s like that.
So, Rabelais’s main character is a huge, gluttonous, belching giant, not someone you may deem to be more worthy, like Robin Hood or King Arthur. We’ll get to the virtues and significance of that anon. And rather ingeniously Gargantua (the book) imitates gigantism stylistically — it’s bloated, messy, excessive, intimidating, and destructive. And the very tissue that composes it is drawn from the French folk culture of Rabelais’s time. It mimics Folk Tales and Fairy Tales (a century before Perrault). Stories of giants date from prehistory, already millennia old when Homer told of Polyphemus. This is its power. Besides this, he compiled jokes, sayings, idiomatic expressions, proverbs, and billingsgate (fluent curses — “pardon my French”) that were part of French street culture, put them in a pot, combined them with his vast, wide scholarship and his own genius and made his monster.
But that’s okay, isn’t it? The Frog Prince and Beauty’s Beast are also monsters. This one just has no handsome alter ego. Consider a couple of the authors we have compared Rabelais to. Recall that Don Quixote is also a comic work, one frequently bawdy and full of slapstick and so forth. But it’s also something more than that, right? As in, one of the greatest literary rides of all time? Or the character of Shakespeare’s Falstaff. I mean, you’d have to be awfully shallow to just reckon him as unworthy and strike him out of the Henriad, wouldn’t you, just because he’s a thieving joker and party dawg? There’s wisdom in his drunken utterances, both the merry and sad ones. So it’s like that. But perhaps requiring a bit more explanation and apology to bridge the wide chasm that has opened up over the past half a millennium. I can think of a couple of more recent authors who get us about halfway there, whom I’m guessing many of you have had exposure to: Swift and Voltaire. In those cases, I believe the author’s ruder comic works have been kept in circulation because they were satirical works of the Enlightenment. In other words, critics and educators feel the coarser parts are justified because they are serving the noble goal of social criticism. Rabelais is also satirical, but in a much broader, much less pointed way. There is no “target” that he proposes to “improve” (though some scholars have identified some public figures of his time that he was likely ridiculing here and there). But if you have time for Swift and Voltaire, the experience of Rabelais’s writing is not unlike that. It’s extravagant, exaggerated, grotesque. Surely Swift had Rabelais on the brain for part one of Gulliver’s Travels. Standing on Swift’s shoulders, Laurence Sterne filled Tristram Shandy with copious references to (and even transplantations from) both Cervantes and Rabelais.
But on the whole, Enlightenment thinkers were too utilitarian and formalistic to appreciate Rabelais in full. The Romantics got him much better. Victor Hugo (who also loved Shakespeare) reflects more than a little of Rabelais’s light in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There we encounter all sorts of elements that point us back to Rabelais: the theme of monstrosity, the fabric of late Medieval France, the tyranny of the Catholic Church, and the populist spirit of carnival. And I find it interesting that Hugo set his novel in 1482, right around the time of Rabelais’s birth. Like Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, Rabelais is a hinge between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These authors were all in the vanguard of the coming transition. It’s one of those rare historical moments where shifts in art can causally be explained by a timeline. The printing press had only just been invented a few decades earlier, releasing a flood of printed works old and new into circulation. Originally a cleric (first a Franciscan friar, then a Benedictine monk, then a parish priest), Rabelais studied at several of France’s best universities, spent a lot of time in Italy, and was learned in Latin, Greek and the field of medicine, all of which fed directly into his world view, while also enhancing his literary tool kit. Not only was Rabelais exposed to the relative ribaldry of ancient authors, but his work as a surgeon brought him into direct and constant contact with the grossness of the human body. A medieval surgeon, can you imagine? Abscesses, plague sores, sawed limbs, goiters, leeches! Organs, innards, and various liquid productions from gore to pus to bile! That was a day at the office!
And for more context, there were some contemporary influences on Rabelais as well. He was was a major admirer of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1509), a mocking, punning humanistic work dedicated to Sir Thomas More, with whom the Dutch author had collaborated on a translation of the ancient Greco-Syrian satirist Lucian (not to be confused with the Roman Lucan). Protestantism was also in the wind, although Rabelais never broke with the Catholic church nor became an atheist as some have claimed. Did Gargantua represent the Church? Too easy. Civilization? Humanity itself? Sure, that’s more like it. It’s not yards away from the concept of HobbesLeviathan, though that was not yet written. The collective as a single beast.
The five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel were published between the early 1530s and the mid 1560s. And people have been misunderstanding them ever since. (There are even, as with Gulliver’s Travels, bowdlerized children’s editions.) It’s safe to say that, apart from the ways in which Rabelais has enriched the French language through his contributed words, idioms, and aphorisms, he remains ahead of his time. Being a Rabelais fan is like embracing Swinburne, Baudelaire, De Sade, Neitzsche, orGenet. To confess an enthusiasm is to make a statement that fills others with disquiet. Rabelais remains an underground taste, suitable for disguising in a brown paper bag. In modern times, Alfred Jarry was one of Rabelais’s chief exponents in his home country and anyone with eyes can draw a clear line from Gargantua to Ubu Roi. But, ya know, it’s not like high school theatre clubs are lining up to produce the works of Alfred Jarry. Rabelais’ Abbey of Thélème, a utopia with the motto “Do What Thou Wilt” was one of the inspirations for Aleister Crowley’s cult of Thelema. (“θέλημα” means “pleasure”, “desire”, “inclination” or “divine will”. )
Rabelais’ most potent champion and apologist of the modern age (and possibly every previous era as well) was the Soviet literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whom I wrote about here. Yes, I’ve already written about Bakhtin on this blog! Because he had a lot more going on than his enthusiasm for Rabelais, although his broader interests tend to be present in the way he looked at that author. Bakhtin wrote Rabelais and His World in 1940. It was translated into English in 1968. And I confess that my enhanced appreciation for the French author comes largely though the Russian’s perceptive eyes. Bakhtin identified the wellspring of Rabelais’s inspiration in what he called the “carnival spirit”, referencing the numerous annual feast days when Cathedral towns across Europe would suspend the usual rules of decorum and permit all manner of transgression, even to to the point of blasphemous parodies of Catholic pomp and ritual.
One of the chief glories of Bakhtin’s book is how it echoes the mission of Rabelais’s. Just as the French author subverts the stifling dogmas of the Catholic church of his time, the very essence of Bakhtin’s commentary upon it is indirectly critiquing oppressive cultural conditions in the Soviet Union. The one is analog to the other, much as Sartre’sThe Flies, ostensibly about Elektra, is simultaneously about French resistance to Fascism. Rabelais is a perfect vehicle for that discussion, because his work was drawn from the folk culture of his times, and thus can be positioned as someone who has articulated the voice of the people, as the Communist Party itself claimed to be doing. But of course the Russian Communists had constructed a massive bureaucratic state that was no longer doing anything of the kind. Its diktats came from above, just like those of the Catholic Church. But they couldn’t very well admit that, which gave Bakhtin lots of wiggle room to talk in a veiled way about what was happening in his own time and place, even as he talked about the life and times of Rabelais. And of course, what is France about but Revolution? That’s what they do! The French had inspired Karl Marx in the first place. But Soviet leaders found themselves in the untenable intellectual position of declaring the necessity of rebellion to be over, now that they were in charge. It was permitted to talk about subversion, but only against the older power structures, such as the Church, Monarchies and Big Business. So a scholar like Bakhtin had free reign to make points about living injustices, but only behind a mask of 500 year old ones.
The virtue of Rabelais is that he is intrinsically subversive. There’s something of Rabelais in nearly every radical, rebellious French thinker, leader, philosopher, author and artist you can name from his day right down to ours, and that is a very long list. He CAN’T be co-opted, as for example Shakespeare can, to serve the purposes of officialdom. To attempt to do that would be by definition to make yourself ridiculous. And that’s why a work like this remains more relevant to us, here and now, than you can possible imagine, trapped as we are inside whatever this is, this late stage capitalist corporate techno-state which is both populated and controlled by a society of gluttonous and callous monsters.
Rabelais threatens to become my Boethius (to reference that latter day Rabelaisian John Kennedy Toole.) So be warned. There are many related posts coming up in the next few days, weeks, and months, because it all relates to theatre, but in the meantime here are some other related posts you may enjoy:
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