Mimesis (48 page)

So much for the second of the themes contained in our passage; it cannot develop freely there, partly because the grotesque joking of the first theme perpetually thwarts it, partly because it is immediately intercepted and paralyzed by the third; the theme
tout comme chez nous
. The most astonishing and most absurd thing about this Gorgiasian world is precisely that it is not entirely different from ours but on the contrary resembles it in the minutest detail; it is superior to ours in that it knows of our world whereas we know nothing of it, but otherwise it is exactly like it. Thus Rabelais gives himself the opportunity of exchanging the roles—that is, of making the cabbage-planting peasant appear as a native European who receives the stranger
from the other world with European naïveté; above all, he gives himself the possibility of developing a realistic scene of everyday life. This is the third theme, which is entirely incompatible with the two others (the grotesque farcicality of the giants, and the discovery of a new world) and which stands in deliberately absurd contrast to them. The whole machinery of huge dimensions and of the daring voyage of discovery seems, then, to have been set in motion only to bring us a peasant of Touraine engaged in planting cabbages.

Just as the locales and the themes change, so too do the styles. The predominant style is that which corresponds to the grotesque theme which serves as frame—the grotesque-comic and popular style, and in its most energetic form, in which the most forceful expressions appear. Beside it, and mingled with it, there is matter-of-fact narrative, philosophical ideas flash out, and amid all the grotesque machinery rises the terrible creatural picture of the plague, when the dead are taken from the city by cartloads. This sort of mixture of styles was not invented by Rabelais. He of course adapted it to his temperament and his purposes, but, paradoxically, it stems from late medieval preaching, in which the Christian tradition exaggerated the mixture of styles to the utmost (cf. p. 161f). These sermons are at once popular in the crudest way, creaturally realistic, and learned and edifying in their figural Biblical interpretation. From the spirit of late medieval preaching, and above all from the atmosphere which surrounded the popular (in both the good and bad senses) mendicant orders, the humanists adopted this mixture of styles, especially for their anti-ecclesiastical, polemical, and satirical writings. From the same spring, Rabelais, who had been a Franciscan in his youth, drew it “more pure” than anyone else. He had studied the mendicant form of life and form of expression at the source and had made it his own in his peculiar way; he can no longer do without it; much as he hated the mendicant orders, their flavorful and earthy style, graphic to the point of ludicrousness, was exactly suited to his temperament and his purpose, and no one ever got so much out of it as he. This filiation was pointed out, for the benefit of those to whom it had not earlier been obvious, by E. Gilson in his fine essay
Rabelais franciscain
(cf. p. 170); we shall later return to this question of style too.

The passage which we have been discussing is a comparatively simple one. The interplay of locales, themes, and stylistic levels in it is comparatively easy to observe, and to analyze it requires no circumstantial investigations. Other passages are far more complex—those,
for example, in which Rabelais gives full vent to his erudition, his countless allusions to contemporary events and persons, and his hurricane word-formations. Our analysis has permitted us, with little effort, to recognize an essential principle of his manner of seeing and comprehending the world: the principle of the promiscuous intermingling of the categories of event, experience, and knowledge, as well as of dimensions and styles. Examples, both from the work as a whole and from sections of it, can be multiplied at will.

Abel Lefranc has shown that the events of book 1, especially the war against Picrochole, take place on the few square miles of the region which lies around La Devinière, an estate belonging to Rabelais’ father’s family; and even to one who does not or did not know this in detail, the place names and certain homely local happenings indicate a provincial and circumscribed setting. At the same time armies of hundreds of thousands appear, and giants, in whose hair cannon balls stick like lice, take part in the battles; arms and victuals are enumerated in quantities which a great kingdom could not have amassed in those days; the number of soldiers alone who enter the vineyard of the monastery of Seuillé and are there cut down by Frère Jean is given as 13,622, women and small children not included. The theme of gigantic dimensions serves Rabelais for perspectivistic effects of contrast, which upset the reader’s balance in an insidiously humorous way; he is perpetually flung back and forth between provincially piquant and homely forms of existence, gigantic and grotesquely extra-normal events, and Utopian-humanitarian ideas; he is never permitted to come to rest on a familiar level of events. The forcefully realistic or obscene elements, too, are made to seethe like an intellectual whirlpool by the tempo of the presentation; and the ceaseless succession of allusions, the storms of laughter which such passages evoke, break through all the ideas of order and decency which prevailed at the time. If one reads such a short text as, for example, Frère Jean des Entommeures’ exhortation in book 1, chapter 42, one finds two robust jokes in it. The first is in regard to a charm which protects against heavy artillery: Frère Jean does not merely say that he does not believe in it, he effortlessly changes the level of observation, places himself on that of the church, which enforces the belief as a condition of divine aid, and, from that point of view, says: the charm will not help me because I do not believe a word of it. The second joke is in regard to the effect of a monk’s frock. Frère Jean begins with the threat that he will drape his frock over any man who shows himself a coward. Naturally one’s
first thought is that this is intended as a punishment and a disgrace; any man so clad would be forthwith dispossessed of the qualities of a proper man. But no, in a twinkling he changes the viewpoint: the frock is medicine for unmanly men; they become men as soon as they have it on; by this he means that the deprivation enforced by vows and the monastic life particularly increases the virile capacities both of courage and sexual potency; and he concludes his exhortation with the anecdote of the Sieur de Meurle’s “feeble-reined” greyhound, which was wrapped in a monk’s frock; from that moment no fox or hare escaped him and he served all the bitches in the neighborhood, though previously he had been among the
frigidis et maleficiatis
(this is the title of a decretal). Or again, read the long-winded account of the things which serve for wiping the posterior, to which the young Gargantua treats us in book 1, chapter 13: what a wealth of improvisation! We find poems and syllogisms, medicine, zoology, and botany, contemporary satire and costume lore. Finally the delight which the intestines share with the whole body when the act referred to is performed with the neck of a young, live, well-downed gosling, is connected with the bliss of the heroes and demi-gods in the Elysian Fields, and Grandgousier compares the wit which his son had displayed on the occasion with that of the young Alexander in Plutarch’s well-known anecdote, which tells how he alone recognized the cause of a horse’s wildness, namely its fear of its own shadow.

Let us consider a few selected passages from the later books. In book 3, chapter 31, the physician Rondibilis, consulted by Panurge in connection with his plan of marrying, sets forth the methods of allaying the all-too-powerful sex urge: first, immoderate wine-drinking; second, certain medicaments; third, steady physical labor; fourth, avid study. Each of these four methods is expounded for several pages, with a superabundance of medical and humanistic erudition through which enumerations, quotations, and anecdotes shower like rain. Fifthly, Rondibilis goes on, the sexual act itself. … Stop, says Panurge, that’s what I was waiting for, that’s the method for me, I leave the others to anyone who wants to use them. Yes, says Frère Jean, who has been listening, Brother Scyllino, Prior of Saint Victor’s near Marseille, had a name for that method, he called it mortifying the flesh. … The whole thing is a mad farce, but Rabelais has filled it with his perpetual flow of changing ideas, his unfailing
trouvailles
, which purposely jumble together all the categories of style and knowledge.

It is the same with the grotesque defense of Judge Bridoye (chapters
39-42 of the same book), who carefully prepared his cases, postponed them again and again, and then decided them by a cast of the dice and who nevertheless for forty years pronounced nothing but wise and just judgments. In his speech, senile drivel is mixed with subtly ironic wisdom, the most wonderful anecdotes are told, the whole of legal terminology is poured out upon the reader in a grotesque cascade of words, every obvious or absurd opinion is supported by a welter of comical quotations from Roman Law and the glossarists; it is a fireworks display of wit, of juridical and human experience, of contemporary satire and contemporary manners and morals, an education in laughter, in rapid shifts between a multiplicity of viewpoints.

As a last example, let us take the scene on shipboard, when Panurge bargains with the sheepmonger Dindenault over a wether (book 4, chapters 6-8). This is perhaps the most effective scene between two characters in Rabelais. The owner of the flock of sheep, the merchant Dindenault from Saintonge, is a choleric and pompous person, but at the same time he is endowed with the crafty, idiomatic, and subtle wit which is natural to almost all of Rabelais’ personages. At their very first encounter he has fooled the Eulenspiegel Panurge to the top of his bent; and, but for the intervention of the ship’s captain and Pantagruel, they would have come to blows. Later, as they sit with the others drinking wine, apparently reconciled, Panurge again asks him to sell him one of his sheep. Then, for page after page, Dindenault cries up his wares. In the course of his speech, he reverts even more markedly to the insulting tone he had first taken with Panurge, whom, with a mixture of suspicion, impertinence, joviality, and condescension, he treats as a fool or a swindler wholly unworthy of such fine wares. Panurge, on the other hand, now remains calm and polite, merely repeating his request for a sheep. Finally, at the insistence of the bystanders, Dindenault names an exorbitant price. Panurge warns him that many a man has fared ill from trying to get rich too fast. Dindenault flies into a rage and begins cursing him. Very well, says Panurge … then counts out the money, chooses a fine fat wether, then, while Dindenault is still reviling him, suddenly throws the wether into the sea. The whole flock jump overboard after it. The despairing Dindenault tries in vain to hold them back. A powerful ram drags him overboard, and he drowns in the same posture in which Odysseus once fled from Polyphemus’ cave. His shepherds and herdsmen are pulled overboard in the same fashion. Panurge picks up a long oar and pushes away those who are trying to swim back to the ship, meanwhile treating
the drowning men to a splendid oration on the joys of eternity and the miseries of life in this world.

So the joke ends grimly, and even rather frighteningly, if one considers the intensity of the ever-cheerful Pantagruel’s urge for vengeance. Yet it remains a joke, which Rabelais has, as usual, stuffed with the most various and grotesque erudition, this time on the subject of sheep—their wool, their hides, their intestines, their flesh, and all their other parts—and adorned, as usual, with mythology, medicine, and strange alchemical lore. Yet this time, the center of interest does not lie in the multifarious outpouring of the ideas which come to Dindenault in his praise of sheep, it lies in the copious portrait which he gives of his own character, and which accounts for the manner of his end. He is taken in and he perishes because he cannot adjust himself, cannot change himself, but instead, in his blind folly and vaingloriousness, runs straight forward, like Picrochole or the
écolier limousin
, his one-track mind incapable of registering his surroundings. It never occurs to him that Panurge may be sharper than himself, that he might sacrifice money for revenge. Thick-headedness, inability to adjust, one-track arrogance which blinds a man to the complexity of the real situation, are vices to Rabelais. This is the form of stupidity which he mocks and pursues.

Almost all the elements which are united in Rabelais’ style are known from the later Middle Ages. The coarse jokes, the creatural concept of the human body, the lack of modesty and reserve in sexual matters, the mixture of such a realism with a satiric or didactic content, the immense fund of unwieldy and sometimes abstruse erudition, the employment of allegorical figures in the later books—all these and much else are to be found in the later Middle Ages. And one might be tempted to think that the only new thing in Rabelais is the degree to which he exaggerates them and the extraordinary way in which he mingles them. But this would be to miss the essence of the matter. The way in which these elements are exaggerated and intertwined produces an entirely new picture. Moreover, Rabelais’ purpose, as is well known, is diametrically opposed to medieval ways of thinking: this gives even the individual elements a different meaning. Late medieval works are confined within a definite frame, socially, geographically, cosmologically, religiously, and ethically; they present but one aspect of things at a time; where they have to deal with a multiplicity of things and aspects, they attempt to force them into the definite frame of a general order. But Rabelais’ entire effort is directed
toward playing with things and with the multiplicity of their possible aspects; upon tempting the reader out of his customary and definite way of regarding things, by showing him phenomena in utter confusion; upon tempting him out into the great ocean of the world, in which he can swim freely, though it be at his own peril.

In my opinion, many critics miss the essential point when they make Rabelais’ divorce from Christian dogma the decisive factor in interpreting him. True, he is no longer a believer, in the ecclesiastical sense; but he is very far from taking a stand upon some definite form of disbelief, like a rationalist of later times. Nor is it permissible to draw any too far-reaching conclusions from his satire on Christian subjects, for the Middle Ages already offer examples of this which are not essentially different from Rabelais’ blasphemous joking. The revolutionary thing about his way of thinking is not his opposition to Christianity, but the freedom of vision, feeling, and thought which his perpetual playing with things produces, and which invites the reader to deal directly with the world and its wealth of phenomena. On one point, to be sure, Rabelais takes a stand, and it is a stand which is basically anti-Christian; for him, the man who follows his nature is good, and natural life, be it of men or things, is good: we should not even need the express confirmation of this conviction which he gives us in the constitution of his Abbey of Thélème, for it speaks from every line of his work. Connected with this conviction is the fact that his creatural treatment of mankind no longer has for its keynote, as does the corresponding realism of the declining Middle Ages, the wretchedness and perishableness of the body and of earthly things in general; in Rabelais, creatural realism has acquired a new meaning, diametrically opposed to medieval creatural realism—that of the vitalistic-dynamic triumph of the physical body and its functions. In Rabelais, there is no longer any Original Sin or any Last Judgment, and thus no metaphysical fear of death. As a part of nature, man rejoices in his breathing life, his bodily functions, and his intellectual powers, and, like nature’s other creatures, he suffers natural dissolution. The breathing life of men and nature calls forth all Rabelais’ love, his thirst for knowledge and his power of verbal representation. It makes him a poet—for he is a poet, and indeed a lyric poet, even though he lacks sentiment. It is triumphant earthly life which calls forth his realistic and super-realistic mimesis. And that is completely anti-Christian, just as it is so opposed to the range of ideas which the creatural realism of the later Middle Ages arouses in us, that it is precisely in
the medieval traits of his style that his alienation from the Middle Ages is most strikingly displayed; their purpose and function have changed completely.