10—
Bakhtin's Discovery
In the twentieth century, as recognition of the breakdown of individual identity has become a commonplace of literary practice, Rabelais's use of communally shaped symbols has begun to influence criticism. Analysis of the folkloric, "medieval!" oral-popular side of the writer's work has intensified.[1] The most powerful evocation of the communal side of Rabelais's writing has come from a man who lived in Lenin's and Stalin's Russia during the construction and destruction of the Marxian ideal of community. Bakhtin's carnivalesque interpretation of Rabelais's communalism was a supremely political act of communication in the sense in which we have used this phrase. It has more than any other single work dislodged Rabelaisian metatexts from their wonted individualist-humanist assumptions; with respect to Bakhtin's more immediate intellectual context, it has had wide-ranging influence as an effectively disguised voice of protest against Stalinist "community."[2]
The interpretation is nonetheless a distortion. If carnivalism means the limitless inversion of official norms during a privileged time of festive freedom, then that kind of inversion can scarcely be found in either Rabelais's text or the behavior of people during Carnival and similar festive moments in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance. Masked defiance there was, in fistfuls. But it was limited and directed by the nature of communalism, which is local, unlike the nature of socialism, which is general.
[1] Aside from Bakhtin (and such older studies as those of Nemours Clement, Marcel Françon, and Etienne Gilson), one may mention the works of Carol Clark, Guy Demerson, Claude Gaignebet, Jean Larmat, John Parkin, and John Lewis. Of course, the great modern editors and commentators on Rabelais, like Abel Lefranc and Jean Plattard, never entirely neglected this side of the author.
[2] See Michael Holquist, "Bakhtin and Rabelais: Theory as Praxis" Boundary 2, vol. 11, nos. 1 and 2 (Fall — Winter 1982): 12–17, for the Russian intellectual debates influencing Bakhtin in the 1930s when he began work on the Rabelais book. See more generally the intellectual biography by Holquist and Katerina Clark, Mikhail Bakhtin (Austin, Tex., 1984.).
Rabelais's procedures are less carnivalesque than communal and less festively inversive than mockingly masked. The procedures are as various as his ways of participating in popular tastes and amusements and also in the interests of all kinds of corporate elites, medicinal, educational, ecclesiastical, and noble. Rabelais's communal memberships were nearly all partial and nonexclusive. There was no concrete totality to which he could belong, vis-à-vis which fractions of the whole or rival totalities must appear unjust or evil — unless one counts the emergent totalisms of Catholic and Protestant Christendom, which indeed gave Rabelais trouble. There was no broad undifferentiated populace into which he was pulled regardless of intent, so that the totality of the people seemed more like the Sausages, inconstant and silly, than like the monstrous Physeter, so alien and aggressive.
To say that Rabelais's communalism has little to do with the binarily reductive mass/elite and popular/official divisions of later European history or with a carnivalism that laughingly places the interests of the whole people above those of its fractions, does not mean that the Rabelaisian text offers no vision of totality or any space to the carnivalesque spirit. The varied oral, literary, and performative practices to which Bakhtin draws attention did not cohere to form a unified tradition of folk-created carnivalism, and Rabelais did not bend his text to serve the ideological purposes of such a carnivalism. But these "ritual spectacles," "comic verbal compositions," and "various genres of billingsgate,"[3] however disparate their source and purpose, are nevertheless important sources of what Bakhtin calls Rabelais's "nonofficial" view of the world — along with such elite-inspired comic elements as the myth of Anti-Nature's children and the image of the Sausages' flying pig deity. Rabelais's worldview, elite and popular by turns, is always nonofficial and hence frequently subversive, inversive, and carnivalesque. The links between the parts of Rabelais's text that are inversive and subversive and those parts that, even when supporting king and church, do so nonofficially (humorously, humanistically, fabulously), might be more accurately characterized as organicist and spiritualist than as popular and carnivalesque.
Organicism: against the mechanical, against the dogmatic, against rules and those dedicated to rules and regularity like the children of Anti-Nature; for matter, for fertility, for life-that-grows, for energy-that-unleashes. Spiritualism: for matter that grows when it "dies," for
[3] Bakhtin, Rabelais, 5.
the mysteries of birth and creation, for the ever-unfinished body; against inert matter and inert acceptance of the world that is. Spiritualized organicism links Rabelais's naturalism and humanism, his "medieval" feudal corporatism and "Renaissance" civic Platonism, his commonplace anticlericalism and reforming evangelism. Organicist, not carnivalesque, spirit supplies the energy that empowers Rabelaisian comedy.[4] Rabelais's spring of "animal spirits" would have remained dry, the author assures Cardinal Odet; Pantagruelism is gaily pickled "spirit"; Alcofribas Nasier's abstraction of "quintessence" harmonizes the effects of his storytelling with the nature of the world, just as the alchemist attempts to imitate nature's production of precious metals by studying the relations among the world's organic essences.[5]
For Bakhtin the most attractive aspect of these venerable Western notions of spirit-impregnated mineral and animal life is embodiment. Embodied spirit, unlike inert, inanimate matter, bubbles forth in animal good humor, in gaiety and laughter. "He [Rabelais] was consistently materialistic, and moreover approached matter only in its bodily aspect." Bakhtin's idea of "materialism" is dialectically Marxist. He refers frequently to the regenerative nature of the body in Rabelais's work, whereby that which dies is already a stage in that which is reborn. "The material components of the universe disclose in the human body their true nature and highest potentialities; they become creative, constructive, are called to conquer the cosmos, organize all cosmic matter."
To document this view of Rabelais's materialism Bakhtin quotes the
[4] Rabelais's burlesque of spiritualism in the episode about Ruach Island (QL, 4.3–44, 677–81) does not indicate that he saw any manner of escaping its toils. Michel Jeanneret formulates Rabelais's commitment to spiritualism in the Fourth Book vis-à-vis his commitment to the dialogic polyvalence of signs, implicit in his communalism, with exactness and elegance in his "Quand la fable se met à table," 178: "L'interrogation des signes [par Pantagruel] comme symboles d'un sens caché, l'intériorisation de l'événement, la prééminence du spirituel, fonctionnent alors comme normes et conférent aux valeurs inverses — celles des amis [de Pantagruel] — le statut du burlesque: le sensuel, le littéral, le farcesque ne sont alors que l'envers, ou le dévoilement qui fait rire, des choses sérieuses." A fuller account of Rabelais's organicist spiritualism would require distinguishing his Renaissance version from that of Romantics. The Renaissance form was founded upon Christian creation: God made the world in this organic-spiritual way, by means of a single fiat. The Romantic form was founded upon process, not act: history (divinely inspired in its turn or not) demiurgically produces a world made in this way.
[5] See. QL, DL, 544, for animal spirits; QL, Pr, 545, for "gaily pickled spirit"; G, 23, for Gargantua, a "book full of Pantagruelism" by Alcofribas, "abstractor."
passage at the end of the Third Book about the wondrous plant called Pantagruelion. The "divination and apotheosis of man" Bakhtin writes, is expressed in the comic eulogy of Pantagruelion,[6] when the gods, terrified at the power the herb has given to men, hold a council to discuss the dire consequences of its discovery, concluding, as Rabelais writes, that
[Pantagruel] will soon marry and his wife will have children . . . . Perhaps his children will invent some herb with the same productive capacity [semblable énergie], by means of which humans would be able to visit the source of hail, the springs of rain, and the workshop of lightning; they could invade the regions of the moon, intrude into the territory of celestial signs and take up residence there, some at the [constellation of the] Golden Eagle, others at the Ram, others at the Crown.[7]
Bakhtin comments: "After the invention of aviation (which Rabelais foresees), man will direct the weather, will reach the stars and conquer them. This entire image of the triumph of mankind is built along the horizontal line of time and space, typical of the Renaissance . . . . Not the biological body, which merely repeats itself in the new generations, but precisely the historic, progressing body of mankind stands at the center of this system of images."[8]
All of this modernizes Rabelais's words exorbitantly. Bakhtin, commenting on the Pantagruelion chapters, abandons demonstration of his interpretive keynote, Rabelais's inveterate carnivalesque spirit. Submitting to the exigencies of an ideological code to which he apparently adhered, whether wittingly or grudgingly, consciously or unconsciously, Bakhtin passes over the episode's burlesque qualities, its caricature of the terrified Olympians, and considers it only from the serious side, as a progressive vision of man's technical future. Thus he concludes his meditation on this episode, stressing the epochal significance of Rabelais's "concept of the body": such a concept represents "not abstract thought about the future but the living sense that each man belongs to the immortal people who create history."[9] From the biological body to the historically creative body, the ever-becoming of Humanity: this is a Hegelian-Marxist interpretation, it is true, but Marx's own thought was, especially in its early development, indebted not only
[6] Bakhtin, Rabelais, 366.
[7] TL, 51, 531.
[8] Bakhtin, Rabelais, 367.
[9] Ibid.
to Hegel but also to the broad Western tradition of Platonic humanism.[10] Bakhtin's metatext reveals new aspects of Rabelais's text because it is an ideological descendant of many of that very text's thought patterns.[11] It obscures other aspects because it is written in the fight of the post-Rabelaisian development of those thought-patterns.[12]
What, then, is Bakhtin's metatextual discovery, if it is neither this materialism which overmodernizes Rabelais nor the idea of an immemorial life of the people expressed in its carnivalesque spirit, an idea that postulates an ahistorical pan-Carnivalism so that the text can ap-
[10] See, e.g., Louis Althusser, "Marxism and Humanism," in his For Marx (New York, 1970), 221–47.
[11] In a book-length essay first written in the 1930s when he was working on his Rabelais book, but revised before publication in the 1970s, Bakhtin gives an even more Hegelian formulation to his organicist view of Rabelais. The general consistency of this earlier essay with the passage just quoted excludes the possibility that the hyperbole is ironic. Ch. 8 of this essay describes a Rabelaisian "chronotope;" that is, literally, time-place; the word is a neologism designed to show how assumptions about time generate a notion of space and "to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well" (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 85). "A new chronotope was needed that would permit one to link real life (history) to the real earth. It was necessary to oppose to eschatology a creative and generative time, a time measured by creative acts, by growth and not by destruction" (ibid., 206). Bakhtin explains: "The passage of time marks . . . a movement toward flowering and ripening. Insofar as individuality is not isolated, such things as old age, decay, and death can be nothing more than aspects subordinated to growth and increase, the necessary ingredients of generative growth" (ibid., 207). This type of temporal-historical vision was created long before Rabelais by "folklore," he adds; Rabelais merely adapted the vision to his uses. "Folkloric time" was "positive" except for its "cyclicity," a feature that "limits the force and ideological productivity of this time . . . . Time's forward impulse is limited by the cycle. For this reason even growth does not achieve an authentic 'becoming'" (ibid., 209–10). It was Rabelais's task to move beyond this limitation with his realistic vision, while at the same time retaining links with the "folkloric base" through his exploration of "laughter" (ibid., 236–42).
[12] One of these aspects is Rabelais's acceptance, within limits not clearly defined in his writings, of a "vertically" defined, Neoplatonically inspired theory of the relation between body and spirit, as in his poem "to the spirit of the queen of Navarre" (see Appendix 3). This sense of spirit, existing in a realm beyond Nature, was certainly involved in Rabelais's Christian beliefs and must have had a connection to the social and biological engendering of spirit Rabelais elsewhere affirms. Bakhtin ignores this kind of ideological polyvalence when he declares in the same passage from which we have been quoting that "nothing remains of the medieval hierarchic vertical" notion of humanity, due to Rabelais's triumphal construction of man's "horizontal" development in time and space.
pear as its reflection? To isolate this discovery requires a distinction between Rabelais's authorial individuality and his participation in a broad current of European thinking and writing stretching from Boccaccio's time to Ben Jonson's. This current may be defined as the effort to synthesize three heterogeneous bodies of culture: the stories, myths, medicine, ritual, and festive performances of nonliterate folk and popular culture; the literate non-Christian science and literature of antiquity; and the literate Christian worldview of medieval times. If one characterizes this effort as carnivalesque, then one implies with Bakhtin that the first of these heterogeneous elements provides the basis of integration for the others. A closer look at the text suggests that any of the three elements may, in a given passage, serve as an organizing principle for incorporating particular elements — proverbs, myths, science, stories, etc. — from any of the three bodies of culture. Other writers and thinkers did the same kind of thing: Thomas Dekker in The Shoemaker's Holiday, Agrippa von Nettesheim in On the Vanity of Sciences, Jean Bodin in the Demonology, not to mention the works of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Cervantes to which Bakhtin also draws attention. There is nothing unique about Rabelais with respect to the synthesizing effort and its variable accent, sometimes elite, sometimes specifically carnivalesque, and sometimes broadly popular.
But Bakhtin also analyzes Rabelais's work at a different level, less concerned with Carnival images and their aggregate importance in Rabelais or the Renaissance. This analytic level deals with the philosophic implications of images of banqueting, of praise and abuse in the marketplace, of birth, death, copulation, defecation, dismemberment, and so on. Bakhtin shows that the aggressiveness and "cruelty" of folk-cultural and popular-cultural humor, its "grotesque realism," its temporal principle of cyclic birth and rebirth, its spatial principle of reversal and inversion, its organic principle of incompleteness and "unfinished" bodiliness, have greater philosophic breadth and more mutual coherence than anyone suspected. Bakhtin asserts that these principles lying behind Rabelais's images were folkloric from time immemorial, but the evidence he cites in support of this view is nearly all literate and highly discontinuous. What derives from what, and where and how it did so, is not pursued.
If one leaves aside the historicization of these principles and their one-sided attribution to the "people," however, one finds a very new way of understanding Rabelais in particular, a way closer to Foucault's
perception of the logic implied by a texts ideas and expressions than to the nineteenth-century Romantic-Hegelian historicism that overlays Bakhtin's writing like a patina.[13] Rabelais's authorial individuality, on Bakhtin's reading, consists in his philosophic deepening of folkloric principles left inchoate and implicit by other writers, as of course they were also left inchoate and implicit by those who acted upon them in the town square, at the market, on saints' days, in battle camps, and indeed wherever men and women mixed and shared their everyday sense of life in public or private.[14]
The salient characteristic of this everyday folkloric sense of life is the absence of any commanding criterion of truth. Truth is irrelevant. This is so for Rabelais as well. Rabelais begins his books by upsetting the sovereign throne of truth in books, the prefatory meeting place between author and reader, and situating instead false authors and false readers in false marketplaces, manor houses, churches, and taverns.
Rabelais's images are often but not always folkloric. Rabelais's "systems of images" are similarly varied in their logical implications, sometimes folkloric and sometimes not.[15] Whether future interpreters of Rabelais agree with Bakhtin's idea of the predominantly folkloric character of both the images and their system, they will in any case have to deal with both levels that the Russian critic has discerned. Bakhtin has shown that the logic of folklore is as richly productive of verbal virtuosity as the art of the rhétoriqueurs, Platonic philosophy, Lucianic storytelling, or Erasmian wise foolishness. It is no longer possible after Bakhtin's metatextual discovery to treat Rabelais's "low," popular aspects as incidental decor to an essentially elite masterpiece.[16]
[13] The differences between Foucault's mode of intellectual history and the German tradition of Geistesgeschichte have not yet been clarified. Foucault defines his method's deviation from the customary French histoire des idées in The Archeology of Knowledge (New York, 1976), 135–40.
[14] This is Michel de Certeau's theme in The Practice of Everyday Life .
[15] The phrase, "systems of images" is used repeatedly by Bakhtin without becoming the object of any methodological discourse (see Bakhtin, Rabelais, 24, 258, 386, 408, etc.). As is shown by Bakhtin's commentary on Pantagruelion, quoted above, the phrase was sometimes used to support Bakhtin's amalgamation of folkloric with Hegelian ideology.
[16] The same cannot be said for Claude Gaignebet's endeavor in A Plus Hault Sens . Although Gaignebet's enterprise is similar to Bakhtin's because it takes Rabelais's folkloric elements to be part of a serious philosophic discourse rather than to be mere decor, Gaignebet endeavors to show that Rabelais's folkloric procedures esoterically express spiritualist-mystic truths. Its "low" parts, properly interpreted, can then be revealed, for all their scatology and obscenity, as having a single "high" essence. Bakhtin does not reduce Rabelais's "system of images" to an essence or philosophic doctrine.
Not carnivalism but communalism, conviviality, and subterfuge: Rabelais depicts the varied and sometimes hostile, sometimes masked encounter of heterogeneous communities and heterogeneous ideologies, not their amalgamation in a universally valid synthesis, low or high, popular or elite. He does not construct an "image of the triumph of mankind." He uses the "horizontal line of time and space" to show the problematic qualities of any and every pretense to triumphal hegemony. By means of the rarely carnivalesque and not always folkloric principles to which Bakhtin draws attention, Rabelais draws into connection and clash within the humanized arena of a fiction many realms that are usually kept ontologically separate. Allegorical figures like Quaresmeprenant and the Sausages or Nature and Anti-Nature are placed on the same level as the Pantagruelians, and the Pantagruelians, by means of Alcofribas, are placed on the same level as you and us, readers and narrators-authors. Quaresmeprenant and the Sausages belong to the popular-cultural world of orally and gesturally transmitted proverbial and festive practices that took form in the Middle Ages; Nature and Anti-Nature belong to the humanistically transmitted lore of literate antiquity; the verbal and bodily behavior of the Pantagruelians identifies them as enlightened representatives of the sixteenth-century Christian-feudal world. Beyond these levels Rabelais's fiction also makes room within the same humanized arena for the pre-Christian gods who hold comic counsel about their fate due to the discovery of Pantagruelion, for the place where the dead are lodged after their disappearance from this world, and for the arcane space within a giant's mouth, no less than for Asclepius falling off a staircase, misanthropic Diogenes, the butchers of Cande, King Henry II, Cardinal Odet, and the sly narrator-author himself.[17]
Rabelais's communalism is broad-gauged, but not all-embracing. His construction integrates much of what was seen as hell in the Christian Middle Ages and as heaven in Greco-Roman antiquity; but Chris-
[17] Asclepius's fall is discussed in ch. 8, n. 71; the butchers of Cande are mentioned in the Carnival-Lent episode (QL, 29, 642), as is Henry II, "the great king of Paris." One of the most remarkable effects of enfolding real with fictive personages is the passing mention of "Rabelays" among the followers of Guillaume du Bellay who were present at his deathbed (QL, 27, 637–38).
tian heaven remains securely in place beyond the fixed sphere of the stars with its revolving constellations, so that it acts as a kind of limit to what can be given narrative form. The Creator and the Savior can be referred to metaphorically, in the guise of an ancient god, like Pan. But they cannot be incorporated into the action. In spite of this limit, the extraordinarily widened world of the Rabelaisian text disrupts, as Bakhtin insists, any vertically integrated understanding of reality, in which the human world could be lodged securely below heaven and above hell. Fiction, allegory, and history, French place names and Utopian geography,[18] nautical accuracy and nautical fantasy, authentic and imaginary written sources of ancient and medieval lore, like the impossibly intimate communication between author and readers, disrupt by their varying levels of concreteness and abstraction every pretension to stable meaning.
Nature and humanity have no fixed forms. The world has no fixable frontiers except for that at the end of the stars. Rabelais's organicist and spiritualist premises conjugate polemically with elements, which from official and elite points of view — Christian or feudal, ancient pagan or modern bourgeois — are "below." In Rabelais the natural world, the material world, the world of work and of craftsmanlike prowess, the "lower bodily stratum" of sex and death and excrement and fecundity, are in fertile, cyclic contact with nearly all that is "above," so that the interplay (I emphasize play ) throws meaning and morals ever and again into disarray, prohibiting the consolidation of different interpretive levels.[19]
Bakhtin's exaltation of Rabelais as the leader of the Renaissance chorus of subversively laughing people is misleading in its overtones: Rabelais's effort at totalism was ultimately cultural more than social, and it was limited by a supernaturalism implicit in the instruments upon which he relied for synthesis, organicism and spiritualism. But in terms of Bakhtin's strategy toward both his immediate public, the audience of state censors without whose imprimatur his book would be in danger, and toward his remoter, larger public of twentieth-century students of cultural history, emphasis on the carnivalesque side of Rabelais's
[18] Gargantua is king of Utopia, and Pantagruel the heir apparent; they reign in the Loire country.
[19] The concluding words of this sentence follow Elizabeth Chesney's astute generalization in her Countervoyage of Rabelais and Ariosto, 82.
energies was astute. It explains the text in a manner that perfectly suits our divisive, mass-cultural context — our context, not Rabelais's.[20] In Rabelais's context there were only partitive communities and emergent individuals, only mixed Carnivals, jointly invented by elite and popular groups, and only Carnival-Lent traditions in flux: no totality, no triumphal humanity, no triumphal Church, either, or at least none in visible, living, organic form; not even a Nature sovereign enough to hold Anti-Nature in check.
Knowingly or unknowingly, Bakhtin adopted something of what I have called Rabelais's late-developed encouragement of oblique readings of text. Seemingly devoted to examining Rabelais's adherence to an ideological program of commitment to the people, his text in fact inculcates a sense of Rabelais's semiotic mode of developing textuality: the systemization of images, not the representation of Rabelais's populist orthodoxy, is Bakhtin's secret theme. Linearly read, Bakhtin's book idealizes and so falsifies its ostensible object, the Rabelaisian text/context. Obliquely read, Bakhtin's book shows that his subtext, the theory that Rabelais wrote easily in the popular vein because he used systems, not single folkloric images and themes, has in its turn a subversive corollary. Bakhtin's ideas are formalist and structuralist no less than socialist in their premises. But he could neither proclaim that publicly nor perhaps think out the meaning of that privately in the land of socialist realism any more than Rabelais could explain or think through his naturalist supernaturalism in a century of state and church inquisitions. Criticism, like literature, may in such conditions have recourse to special strategies for dealing with the danger of cultural submission to
[20] Holquist and Clark, Mikhail Bakhtin, 388, admiringly cite the view of Sidney Monas concerning Bakhtin's "relation" to Rabelais and to James Joyce, a view that well expresses the appeal for twentieth-century Westerners of this dislocation of Rabelais, Carnival, and "folklore" from their late-medieval and Renaissance contexts: "Sidney Monas has defined the relation between Rabelais, Joyce, and Bakhtin best by insisting that the link between them all is 'folklore — a deep involvement in the most ancient, most basic and folkloric traditions. Not, certainly, sentimental folklorico in the manner of the Celtic twilight. Really the most fundamental stuff: fertility rituals, assisted by ritual clowns, who, like the Zuni clowns, drink their own urine, the celebration of life-out-of-death, degradation and renewal, debasement and resurrection . . . reaching back beyond Christian times to the Roman Satrunalia and beyond that to the prehistoric! Monas, 'Verbal Carnival: Bakhtin, Rabelais, Finnegans Wake, and the Growthesk,' paper read at International Bakhtin Conference, Queens' University, Kingston, Ontario, Oct. 8, 1983."
social ends. From Rabelais's time to Bakhtin's, one strategy has been fiction's capacity — and hence also criticism's capacity, in dealing with such fiction — for bewilderingly recursive communication (who is the author? where is the reader?) and bitingly ambivalent polysemy (how does a text refer, coordinate, mean?).
Bakhtin's methodological insistence that fictions be read not only page by page and symbol by symbol but also as coherent wholes, and his discovery that the Rabelaisian text can be perceived, when so read, as a series of image systems, is not demonstrated point for point in his book. The argument is loosely woven, its documentation sporadic. For that reason perhaps it is all the more suggestive. I have used Bakhtin's idea of image systems in various ways here, without referring to it as such. One way is to use it as an informal means of testing Rabelais's texts for the presence of countertext. A series of images, it seems to me, requires at least three components to constitute a system. Can I find a recurrence of at least three linked meaning-clusters or "images" ironically propounded, first in the 1548 prologue and later in the supposedly straightforward text of the dedicatory letter? I think I have.[21]
Another way to use it is more constructively heuristic. Suppose that the commonplace symbolic series, sausage is like penis is like woman, can be established as occurring in Rabelais's text. So what? If this is truly an image system, then it should have the three aspects that words regularly display. What corresponds on the levels of thought pattern and referent pattern to the series of symbols or, linguistic vehicles? Sausages gratify male bodily desire as the penis gratifies male bodily pride and women gratify men's bodily pleasure. This psychophysical thought pattern is found in a number of different Rabelaisian passages, and in turn it corresponds to a related series of socially oriented propositions, a recurrent pattern referring to the way society is perceived to function: the pride of possessing the penis is socially displayed in the assumptions of patriarchy (hierarchical power over sexual relations is equivalent to hierarchical power over social relations); women's subordination to male pleasure is socially displayed by their subordination in marriage; and sausages' desirability is socially displayed as male-female familial fecundity, as pretty, fatty, wriggly, babylike bodiliness. The referent pattern seems to be displayed in the social arrangements (and absences) on Ferocious Island; phallocentrism and patriarchy emerge as consistent subtexts.
[21] See ch. 9.
Bakhtin's emphasis on the word "image" is well chosen. What makes the systems something more than dismayingly repetitive commonplaces, however interesting their connections, is the aesthetic power of the linguistic vehicles. What matters most is Rabelais's ability to give his meanings imaginative embodiment.
The Rabelaisian metatext has changed twice: first in consonance with individualistic society and culture and its emphasis on exploring personality, and second in harmony with mass society and culture and its emphasis on exploring the ironic countereffects and inversions of individual aspiration. This book lives in and by means of the second context. Pluralism, psychologism, nostalgia for a communal age inspire in no small measure the metatext which you well-wishing readers hold in your hands.
I have defended Bakhtin's subtext and countertext as a way of explaining the excesses of his book's surface. Bakhtin's explanation of the way "folkloric" principles function systematically to relate images previously understood as trivial and unconnected is fundamental. He has changed our sense of how to investigate the text/context connection. We must widen our investigations of sixteenth-century popular life, as previous generations widened our awareness of Rabelais's learned sources.
The investigation of Rabelais's Carnival, which began in Parts One and Two from a Bakhtin-inspired concept of the texts context, led from reconstruction of sixteenth-century Carnival-Lent customs to quite another kind of research in the second half of this book. It is one thing to suggest that Quaresmeprenant, the physeter, the Sausages, the flying pig, and the Pantagruelian warriors may be seen as a puppetlike parade of Carnival excesses, on the model of traditional Carnival-Lent combats on mardi gras. It is another matter to prove that such a model of the episode in the Fourth Book is more adequate textually and contextually than these chapters' usual interpretation as three separate episodes in which the first supposedly deals rather clearly with Lenten excess.
Text/context thus led not merely to the history of metatext but to a theory of how metatexts evolve. It led to reconstruction of both the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century misconception of the passage and also the reasons for twentieth-century conservation of the misconception, long after Rabelais's satiric, anticlerical, and supposedly "Protestant" proclivities had been reconsidered. As long as the
sixteenth-century nonliterary context of Rabelais's writing is considered irrelevant, "intertextual" reading of these chapters will be inclined to interpret Quaresmeprenant as an ambiguous idea of Lent rather than ambivalent figure of Carnival. Reading Quaresmeprenant as Quaresme is more generally consonant with the twentieth-century's remoteness and impatience with issues of Christian ritual; it is simpler to read "directly" from the text.
To escape this impasse — after all, does not each epoch have a right, perhaps even an obligation, to generate its own version of a classic text? — required a third circle of investigations. In this circle I used semiotic: and structural distinctions. By their means the current critical fashion of treating Rabelais's text as linguistically rather than folklorically carnivalesque — that is, as an extreme "carnivalism," or as a kind of infinitely playful intertextuality — was related to the ideological sources of Bakhtin's metatext. Implicit in the analysis of Bakhtin's spiritous, organic "materialism" is the trace of a similar but unperformed analysis of intertextuality as an antispiritual, mechanistically articulated science of interpretation. For different but equally cogent reasons, historicizing organicism and mechanistic science both suit our age.
A text acts upon readers because it comes to them attached to their apprehension of the contexts interacting with it. Readers' apprehension of the text/context connection grows as awareness of the author's "sources" grows, that is, as readers immerse themselves in the scholarship displayed in metatext. But this aid is a snare. At any given time metatext, the tradition of interpreting a text, is for readers who are coming to the text for the first time a part of the texts context. The difference of metatextual acumen from that of the original author and that of the new readers becomes apparent only insofar as new readers, having pursued enough metatextual history to allow them to disentangle that history from the author's context, map for themselves the horizon and then the intervening space that have led them here and now to read.