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Mythic Unity in Rabelais

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Stanley G. Eskin
Stanley G. Eskin*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley 94720
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Extract

Rabelais's book opens with a cryptic allusion to a “sustantificque mouelle” hidden under the surface hilarity of his story and ends (if it was he who ended it) with an equally cryptic pronouncement by an oracular bottle. The penetration which is urged at the beginning—through fiber and bone to the marrow of truth which they protect—is evidently consummated at the end, the physiological turning into a geological image as Pantagruel and his friends penetrate the underground sanctuary where, in a flood of miraculous light, one may hear the word of truth, which is Trinch. The opinions of critics on this pronouncement range from considering it an absurd joke to a grave and specific allegory of one thing or another. Similarly, the substantific marrow which Rabelais promises us at the beginning is taken by some as a joke which hides a truth and by others as a joke that hides nothing but another joke. Most agree that there is a mixture of joke and seriousness in Rabelais's book, but some insist on a complete disjunction between the comic and the serious, while others argue for a close interpenetration.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 5 , December 1964 , pp. 548 - 553
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1907

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References

1 Œuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Boulenger (Paris, 1934), Bk. i, Prol., p. 27; Bk. v, Ch. xliv, p. 904.

2 Emile Faguet will not take the conclusion of Book v seriously at all (Seizième siècle, Paris, 1894, pp. 110–111); Abel Lefranc interprets the word of the Dive Bouteille as a symbol of faith in scientific knowledge (Les Navigations de Pantagruel, Paris, 1904, pp. 248 ff.); Anatole France sees “Trinch” as meaning drink the wine of learning, truth, and a joyful understanding of the world, of man, and of nature (Œuvres complètes, Paris, 1928, xvii, 252); Arthur Tilley sees Panurge's search as a search after truth and the oracle as indicating that there is no assurance of truth, and hence that man must rely on his own will within the frame of the divine order (Rabelais, London, 1907, pp. 342–358); and in a recent article Mr. Jesse Zeldin argues that Panurge misinterprets the oracle as justifying irrational abandonment to drink whereas the true message, understood by Pantagruel and Frère Jean, concerns the rational exercise of will to dominate the passions (L'Esprit créateur, iii, 2, Summer 1963, 68–74).

3 D. B. Wyndham Lewis, in his petulant Doctor Rabelais (New York, 1957), considers Rabelais's serious pretensions worthless; Charles Marty-Laveaux, in Histoire de la langue et de la littérature françaises, ed. L. Petit de Julleville (Paris, 1911), insists on a categorical separation of the comic from the serious in Rabelais (iii, 53); and A. C. Keller in The Telling of Tales in Rabelais (Frankfurt, 1963) distinguishes between “Pantagruelism,” which is serious ideology, and “Rabelaisianism,” which is comic narrative (p. 76). On the other hand, a close integration of the comic and the serious is argued by Pierre Villey in Les Grands Écrivains du XVIème siècle: Rabelais et Marot, Vol. xi of Bibliothèque littéraire de la renaissance (Paris, 1923), p. 257; by Tilley, op. cit., p. 301; by Paul Stapfer in Rabelais, sa personne, son génie, son œuvre (Paris, 1889), pp. 89–113; and by J. C. Powys in Rabelais (London, 1948), p. 23 and pp. 306 ff.

4 Cf. Nemours H. Clemens, The Influence of the Arthurian Romances on the Five Books of Rabelais, Univ. of California Pubis. in Modern Philology, xii, 3 (Berkeley, 1926), p. 248.

5 The consultants in Book iii, however, are not all equally representative of error, and a strong case may in fact be made for some of them as representative of truth. This is especially true of the theologian Hippothadée, whom some critics see as Rabelais's mouthpiece for a sensible, moderate doctrine of submission to the will of God, without, however, losing opportunities for the exercise of free will under the ethical guidance of the Bible. This view is best argued by M. A. Screech in The Rabelaisian Marriage (London, 1958), pp. 66–83. Mr. Screech sees strong positive values also in Rondibilis and Trouillogan. For an opposite view, however, see Verdun L. Saulnier, Le Dessein de Rabelais (Paris, 1957), pp. 103–120. M. Saulnier considers even these more dependable consultants deficient in their facile reliance on mechanical professional formulas. For my part, Trouillogan strikes me as an object of satire, Rondibilis as an interesting but ultimately neutral contributor to the problem at hand, and Hippothadée as often wise but at bottom evasive.

6 See H. Gaidoz, “Gargantua,” Revue archéologique, xviii (1868), 179–180.

7 See Henri Dontenville, La Mythologie française (Paris, 1948), pp. 66–71.

8 See Marcel Françon, ed., Les Croniques admirables (Rochecorbon, 1956), p. xlviii. M. Françon's preface provides a useful summary of these various theories.

9 Ibid., p. xli.

10 Ibid., p. 50.

11 Le Vroy Gargantua. ed. M. Françon (Paris, 1949), p. 92. I am not arguing that these two chapbooks are specific sources of Rabelais, a contention which, in spite of various efforts, seems impossible to demonstrate; I am merely assuming that these books are typical of the material from which Rabelais was drawing.

12 Your beauty “est tant excellente, tant singulière, tant céleste, que je crois que Nature l'a mise en vous comme un parragon pour nous donner entendre combien elle peut faire quand elle veult employer toute sa puissance et tout son sçavoir” (ii, xxi, 283).

13 Roman de la rose, ed. Ernest Langlois (Paris, 1914), ll. 139–142. Cf. Rabelais, i, liv, 173–175. See also Louis Thuasne, “Rabelais et le Roman de la rose,” in Villon et Rabelais (Paris, 1911), pp. 165–204.

14 iv, xxxiii, 650–651. See my “Physis and Antiphysie: The Idea of Nature in Rabelais and Calcagnini,” Comparative Literature, xiv (Spring 1962), 167–173.

15 E.g., iii, xiii, 395; v, xxix, 858.