Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais

Лекция 12

Francois Rabelais as a French Renaissance writer, humanist, physician and Renaissance humanist.

François Rabelais (/ræble/; French: [f.swa a.bl]; between 1483 and 1494 – 9 April 1553) was a French Renaissance writer, humanist, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs. His best known work is Gargantua and Pantagruel. Because of his literary power and historical importance, Western literary critics considered him one of the great writers of world literature and among the creators of modern European writing. His literary legacy is such that today, the word Rabelaisian has been coined as a descriptive inspired by his work and life. Merriam-Webster defines the word as describing someone or something that is "marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism."

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Gargantua and Pantagruel tells the story of two giants—a father, Gargantua, and his son, Pantagruel—and their adventures, written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein.

While the first two books focus on the lives of the two giants, the rest of the series is mostly devoted to the adventures of Pantagruel's friends – such as Panurge, a roguish, erudite maverick, and Brother Jean, a bold, voracious and boozing ex-monk – and others on a collective naval journey in search of the Divine Bottle.

Even though most chapters are humorous, wildly fantastic and sometimes absurd, a few relatively serious passages have become famous for descriptions of humanistic ideals of the time. In particular, the letter of Gargantua to Pantagruel and the chapters on Gargantua's boyhood present a rather detailed vision of education.

Thélème

See also: Thelema

It is in the first book that Rabelais writes of the Abbey of Thélème, built by the giant Gargantua. It differs remarkably from the monastic norm, as the abbey has a swimming pool, maid service, and no clocks in sight.

One of the verses of the inscription on the gate to the Abbey says:

Grace, honour, praise, delight,

Here sojourn day and night.

Sound bodies lined

With a good mind,

Do here pursue with might

Grace, honour, praise, delight.

Rabelais gives us a description of the way of life of the Thélèmites of the abbey and their rule:

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,

Do What Thou Wilt;

because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.

Views

Most scholars today agree that the French author wrote from a perspective of Christian humanism. This has not always been the case. Abel Lefranc, in his 1922 introduction toPantagruel, depicted Rabelais as a militant anti-Christian atheist. M. A. Screech opposed this view and interpreted Rabelais as an Erasmian Christian humanist, the view that commands majority support today.

Rabelais was Roman Catholic. Timothy Hampton writes that "to a degree unequaled by the case of any other writer from the European Renaissance, the reception of Rabelais's work has involved dispute, critical disagreement, and ... scholarly wrangling ..." But at present, "whatever controversy still surrounds Rabelais studies can be found above all in the application of feminist theories to Rabelais criticism".

In literature

In his novel Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne quotes extensively from Rabelais.

Alfred Jarry performed, from memory, hymns of Rabelais at Symbolist Rachilde's Tuesday salons. Jarry worked for years on an unfinished libretto for an opera by Claude Terrasse based on Pantagruel.

Anatole France lectured on him in Argentina. John Cowper Powys, D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, and Lucien Febvre (one of the founders of the French historical school Annales) wrote books about him. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher and critic, derived his celebrated concept of the carnivalesque and grotesque body from the world of Rabelais.

Hilaire Belloc was a great admirer of Rabelais. He praised him as "at the summit" of authors of fantastic books. He also wrote a short story entitled "On the Return of the Dead" in which Rabelais descended from heaven to earth in 1902 to give a lecture in praise of wine at the London School of Economics, but was instead arrested.

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote Rabelais and His World, praising the author for understanding and unbridled embrace of the carnival grotesque. In the book he analyzes Rabelais's use of the carnival grotesque throughout his writings and laments the death of the purely communal spirit and regenerating laughter of the carnival in modern culture.

George Orwell was not an admirer of Rabelais. Writing in 1940, he called him "an exceptionally perverse, morbid writer, a case for psychoanalysis".

Milan Kundera, in a 2007 article in The New Yorker, wrote: "(Rabelais) is, along with Cervantes, the founder of an entire art, the art of the novel." (page 31). He speaks in the highest terms of Rabelais, calling him "the best", along with Flaubert.

Rabelais was a major reference point for a few main characters (Boozing wayward monks, University Professors, and Assistants) in Robertson Davies's novel The Rebel Angels, part of the The Cornish Trilogy. One of the main characters in the novel, Maria Theotoky, writes her PhD on the works of Rabelais, while a murder plot unfolds around a scholarly unscathed manuscript. Rabelais was also mentioned in Davies's books The Lyre of Orpheus, and Tempest-Tost.

Rabelais is highlighted as a pivotal figure in Kenzabur e's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994.

Henry Miller, in his first novel, Tropic of Cancer, speaks admiringly of Rabelais in several passages.

The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (French: La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais, which tells of the adventures of two giants, Gargantua (/ræntu/; French: [a..ty.a]) and his son Pantagruel (/pæntærul, -l, pæntrul/; French: [p.ta.y.l]). The text is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein, and features much crudity, scatological humor, and violence (lists of explicit or vulgar insults fill several chapters).

The censors of the Collège de la Sorbonne stigmatized it as obscene, and in a social climate of increasing religious oppression in a lead up to the French Wars of Religion, it was treated with suspicion, and contemporaries avoided mentioning it. According to Rabelais, the philosophy of his giant Pantagruel, "Pantagruelism", is rooted in "a certain gaiety of mind pickled in the scorn of fortuitous things" (French: une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites).

Rabelais had studied Ancient Greek and he applied it in inventing hundreds of new words in the text, some of which became part of the French language. Wordplay and risqué humor abound in his writing.

Plot summary

Pantagruel

The full modern English title for the work commonly known as Pantagruel is The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua and in French, Les horribles et épouvantables faits et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel Roi des Dipsodes, fils du Grand Géant Gargantua. The original title of the work was Pantagruel roy des dipsodes restitué à son naturel avec ses faictz et prouesses espoventables. Although most modern editions of Rabelais's work place Pantagruel as the second volume of a series, it was actually published first, around 1532 under the pen name "Alcofribas Nasier", an anagram of François Rabelais.

Pantagruel was a sequel to an anonymous book entitled The Great Chronicles of the Great and Enormous Giant Gargantua (in French, Les Grandes Chroniques du Grand et Enorme Géant Gargantua). This early Gargantua text enjoyed great popularity, despite its rather poor construction. Rabelais's giants are not described as being of any fixed height, as in the first two books of Gulliver's Travels, but vary in size from chapter to chapter to enable a series of astonishing images as though these were tall tales. For example, in one chapter Pantagruel is able to fit into a courtroom to argue a case, but in another the narrator resides inside Pantagruel's mouth for 6 months and discovers an entire nation living around his teeth.

At the beginning of this book, Gargantua's wife dies giving birth to Pantagruel, who grows to be as giant and scholarly as his father. Rabelais gives a catalog of his reading, mostly humorously-titled books, and judgements in nonsensical legal cases. "The lion’s share of Pantagruel’s seventh chapter consists of a concluding catalog attributed to the Abbey of Saint-Victor", states Bodemer in his essay, "Rabelais and the Abbey of Saint-Victor Revisited."

He befriends hard-partying jokester Panurge. Together with a group of friends, they intoxicate an army of invading giants, burn their camp, and drown survivors in urine. Epistemon, decapitated in the fray, recovers when Panurge sews his head back to his body. He reports that souls in hell are poorly paid and work bad jobs, but that's the extent of their torments. Another battle is missed by the narrator, who is exploring the civilization in Pantagruel's mouth at the time.

Gargantua

After the success of Pantagruel, Rabelais revisited and revised his source material. He produced an improved narrative of the life and acts of Pantagruel's father in The Very Horrific Life of Great Gargantua, Father of Pantagruel (in French, La vie très horrifique du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel), commonly known as Gargantua. This volume begins with the miraculous birth of Gargantua after an 11-month pregnancy.

The labor is so difficult, his mother threatens to castrate his father, Lord Grandgousier. The giant Gargantua emerges at his mother's left ear, calling for ale, while 17,913 cows were required for the provision of his daily milk. His first garment featured a codpiece whose "exiture, outjecting or outstanding ... was of the length of a yard",^[6] its contents providing so much delight that his three nurses squabble over claims to it.^[7] After some indifferent education at home, he is sent to Paris where the crowds so annoy him that he drowns thousands of them in a flood of urine (the survivors laugh so much, the city is renamed "Par Ris").

He steals the bells of St. Anthony, but gives them back after a sophist makes ludicrously self-centered appeals for their return. While he studies diligently in Paris, the neighboring Lord Picrochole's bakers are insulted and attacked by Grandgousier's shepards. A massive retaliatory strike against Grandgousier's lands is finally halted at Seville by the merciless Friar John. Grandgousier sues for peace, but Picrochole arrogantly rebuffs him. Gargantua and Friar John rally the troops and (after Gargantua nearly swallows 6 pilgrims who accidentally fell in his salad) they win a great battle, drive Picrochole back to his city, then overthrow it.

As a reward, Friar John is given funds to establish the "anti-church" Abbey of Thélème, which has become one of the most notable parables in Western philosophy. It can be considered a point-by-point critique of the educational practices of the age, or a call for free schooling, or a defense of all sorts of notions on human nature.

The Third Book

Rabelais then returned to the story of Pantagruel himself in the last three books. In The Third Book of Pantagruel (in French, Le tiers-livre de Pantagruel; the original title is Le tiers livre des faicts et dicts héroïques du bon Pantagruel), the narrative style changes to a parody of the philosophical dialogue, where the earthy Panurge gets the last word. He sermonizes against moral restraint and in favor of indebtedness, yet accepts Pantagruel's offer to repay all of his creditors.

Now financially solvent for the first time, Panurge stops wearing his long codpiece and seeks advice about whom to marry. Various auguries (opening Virgil to a random page, inducing prophetic dream through half-hearted fasting) and councillors - the Sibyl of Panzoust, the mute Goatnose, the old poet Raminagrobis, Friar John, a group of learned doctors and lawyers, and a fool - all agree that if he marries, his wife will cheat on him, beat him, and rob him. But he egregiously reinterprets their prophecies in a more favorable light.

In a brief interlude, Pantagruel defends Judge Brindlegoose, who has pronounced sentence by rolling dice for 40 years, on the grounds that he is an old idiot and therefore favored by Fortune. As a last attempt to settle the question of marriage, Pantagruel and Panurge take a sea voyage to consult the Oracle of Bacbuc ("Divine Bottle"). Their ship is well-provisioned with the phallic herb Pantagruelion, for which Rabelais gives a ribald natural history.

The Fourth Book

The sea voyage continues for the whole of The Fourth Book of Pantagruel (in French, Le quart-livre de Pantagruel; the original title is Le quart livre des faicts et dicts héroïques du bon Pantagruel). The whole book can be seen as a comical retelling of the Odyssey, or of the story of Jason and the Argonauts. In The Fourth Book, perhaps his most satirical, Rabelais criticizes what he perceived as the arrogance and wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, the political figures of the time, and popular superstitions, and he addresses several religious, political, linguistic, and philosophical issues.

The group sail to East Asia, and buy many exotic animals. Panurge quarrels with the sheep merchant Dingdong, and takes his revenge by drowning him and his flock. They pass by the islands of the Bailiffs, whose peasants charge to be beaten. During a terrible storm at sea, Panurge is paralyzed with fear, but feigns insufferable bravura afterwards. After slaying a sea-monster, and being informed of the death of the giant Lent, they arrive at Wild Island, where the half-sausage inhabitants (called Chitterlings) mistake Pantagruel for their enemy Lent and attack.

The battle is stopped by a divine winged pig, who excretes mustard on the battlefield. They proceed to Ruach, whose people eat air, to barren Pope-Figland where a farmer and his wife outwit the devil, and to the arrogantly Catholic Papimania, where the people worship the Pope and his Decretals. After sailing through a cloud of frozen words and sounds, they come to an island that worships Gaster, the god of food. The book ends when Pantagruel fires a salute at the island of the Muses, and Panurge befouls himself for fear of the sound, and of the "celebrated cat Rodilardus".

The Fifth Book

The Fifth Book of Pantagruel (in French, Le cinquième-livre de Pantagruel; the original title is Le cinquiesme et dernier livre des faicts et dicts héroïques du bon Pantagruel), was published posthumously around 1564, and chronicles the further journeyings of Pantagruel and his friends. At Ringing Island, the company find birds living in the same hierarchy as the Catholic church.

On Tool Island, the people are so fat they slit their skin to allow the fat to puff out. At the next island they are imprisoned by Furred Law-Cats, and escape only by answering a riddle. Nearby, they find an island of lawyers who nourish themselves on protracted court cases. In the Queendom of Whims, they uncomprehendingly watch a living-figure chess match with the miracle-working and prolix Queen Quintessence.

Passing by the abbey of the sexually prolific Semiquavers, and the Elephants and monstrous Hearsay of Satin Island, they come to the realms of darkness. Led by a guide from Lanternland, they go deep below the earth to the oracle of Bacbuc. After much admiring of the architecture and many religious ceremonies, they come to the sacred bottle itself. It utters the one word "trinc". After drinking liquid text from a book of interpretation, Panurge concludes wine inspires him to right action, and he forthwith vows to marry as quickly and as often as possible.

The last volume's attribution to Rabelais is debatable. The Fifth Book was not published until nine years after his death and includes much material that is clearly borrowed (such as from Lucian's True History and Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) or of lesser quality than the previous books. In the notes to his translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Donald M. Frame proposes that the Fifth Book may have been formed from unfinished material that a publisher later patched together. This interpretation has been largely supported by Mireille Huchon in "Rabelais Grammairien", the first book to provide a rigorous grammatical analysis of the matter.

J.M.Cohen, in his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, states that chapters 17-48 were written by another hand using notes left by Rabelais and the general drift of what Rabelais had written of the Fifth Book.

Analysis

Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais

Mikhail Bakhtin's book Rabelais and His World explores Gargantua and Pantagruel and is considered a classic of Renaissance studies. Bakhtin declares that for centuries Rabelais' book had been misunderstood. Throughout Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin attempts two things. Firstly, to recover sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel that in the past were either ignored or suppressed. Secondly, to conduct an analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language which was not.

Through this analysis, Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts in Rabelais' work: the first is carnivalesque which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism, which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body.

Bakhtin explains that carnival in Rabelais' work and age is associated with the collectivity, for those attending a carnival do not merely constitute a crowd. Rather the people are seen as a whole, organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and political organization. According to Bakhtin, “[A]ll were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age”.

At carnival time, the unique sense of time and space causes the individual to feel he is a part of the collectivity, at which point he ceases to be himself. It is at this point that, through costume and mask, an individual exchanges bodies and is renewed. At the same time there arises a heightened awareness of one’s sensual, material, bodily unity and community.

Bakhtin says also that in Rabelais the notion of carnival is connected with that of the grotesque. The collectivity partaking in the carnival is aware of its unity in time as well as its historic immortality associated with its continual death and renewal. According to Bakhtin, the body is in need of a type of clock if it is to be aware of its timelessness. The grotesque is the term used by Bakhtin to describe the emphasis of bodily changes through eating, evacuation, and sex: it is used as a measuring device.