2—
Modes of Representation
Rabelais's play with the paratextual frame of the text prepares the reader to look for the same kind of swerving game in the narrative proper. In the Fourth Book this is facilitated by the magic voyage theme. The story line alternates between descriptions of the islands, interruptions in the manner of an oral teller of tales by Alcofribas Nasier, and reflections on the behavior of the islanders by Pantagruel and his friends. Thus, the comic-epic frame is broken into and broken down not only by the narrator but also by the meditations of Pantagruel, the ludic digressions of Panurge, the choleric interruptions of Friar John, and the learned explanations of Xenomanes. Although the travelers are ostensibly searching for the Oracle of the Holy Bottle, which will answer the questions posed by Panurge in the Third Book , nothing seems further from their minds. Pantagruel's fleet meanders through a series of seaborne allegories of sometimes political and sometimes cultural issues, drained of their contemporary violence by being projected upon imaginary islands. The body of the text thus nearly inverts the feint of the prologue: the movement of the episodes from island to island of talk creates a more verbally than physically active presence of the Pantagruelists to the objects along their passage. But in a deeper sense the textual strategy is the same as that in the paratext, transforming again and again a narration by represented authors into the semblance of a direct transcription of oral exchange.
Such is the framework established by the time readers arrive at chapter 29, the beginning of the Quaresmeprenant-Sausage episode. There they encounter the unnatural fellow on Tapinos Island who has Lenten habits while bearing Carnival's name. Friar John, a Carnival reveler par excellence, always eager to fight and eat, urges the Pantagruelians to go to the island and attack him. Would this fight — if it had occurred, which it didn't — have confirmed early readers' expectations? How did people in Rabelais's time conceive the opposition between Carnival and Lent? How was this opposition represented?
The tradition of Carnival-Lent conflict had some iconic and per-
formative meaning for everyone. The contrast between the two was inseparable from Christian doctrine and liturgy as conceived in medieval Roman Catholic Europe. During the annual cycle of Lenten sermons Carnival behavior served the preacher as the obvious, proximate reason for repentance and contrition. Because this Christian attention was embedded in the calendar of springtime, the Church's sense of the Carnival-Lent boundary tended over time to fuse and become confused with lay people's celebration of the year's turning toward outdoor activities, warmth, and light. Carnival festivities, occurring in February or early March, grew up as a complex of Christian and non-Christian seasonal themes, in which masking and parading about as animals and wild forces of a reawakening nature were as important as banqueting, carousing, and having a last fling before Lent.
The festive ambience that grew up around the Carnival-Lent boundary produced literature and art from the early thirteenth century onward: poems, ballads, prose narratives, marginal illustrations in manuscripts, and eventually woodcuts and paintings inform us about the celebrations. From the late thirteenth century a subgenre of these festive representations emerged that must have been familiar in outline to the elite and literate and must also have been broadcast widely through hearsay, oral repetition, and incorporation into masking and parading practices. This subgenre depicts the difference between Carnival and Lent as a conflict between personifications of the two occasions. To this subgenre Rabelais's Quaresmeprenant-Sausage episode belongs. Some seventy texts and pictures, stemming from scattered parts of Western Europe between the thirteenth and the eighteenth century allow us to trace growth and change in this subgenre.[1]
The earliest pictures of a personified Carnival confronting a personified Lent are a lost oil painting by Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516) and a Flemish tempera painting on linen noted in an inventory of the Medici palace in Florence after it was sacked in 1494. Four copies of Bosch's painting have been preserved, indicating strong contemporary interest in not only the artist but also the artists' theme.[2] The best known depiction is Brueghel's oil painting of 1559, The Combat of Carnival and
[1] Martine Grinberg and Samuel Kinser, "Les Combats de Carnaval et de Carême, Trajets d'une métaphore," Annales: economics, sociétés, civilisations 38 (1983): 65. I have found other texts and illustrative materials since publication of this article, some of which are cited in notes below.
[2] See C. G. Stridbeck, "'Combat between Carnival and Lent' by Pieter Brueghel the Elder," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institues (1956): 98–99, and Plates 30–31, for references to the tempera painting on linen and to the copies of Bosch's work.
Lent, based in part upon an etching by Frans Hoghenberg made in 1558.
Hoghenberg's work is situated in the Flemish countryside near a village (see Fig 2).Two groups of people, some masked and in costume and others not, advance toward each other from opposite sides, waving weapons. In the middle of each group is a wagon, one carrying Carnival and the other Lent. At the top of the print are the Flemish words: "Here comes Fat Carnival with all his guests to combat Lean Lent."[3]
Brueghel's painting transports the scene to a small town square into which merrymakers are crowded on one side and the devout and not-so-devout on the other.[4] Unlike Hoghenberg, who devotes more space to the bucolic ambience than to the festive figures, Brueghel's scene brims with people and their activities; iconic references to the town are pushed into corners and serve as props for the people's activities. Carnival is a fat young man seated on a wine barrel, like the Hoghenberg prototype. He has a sausage hanging from his lance and a chicken pie on his hat. Lent is a thin old woman wearing leeks and mussel shells. Instead of placing them in the middle ground of the picture, as Hoghenberg does, Brueghel locates the two toward its lower edge. Hoghenberg shows most people preceding or following their leaders; most of the people in Brueghel's picture pursue their own pleasures or concerns. Is the painting an allegory or a realistic depiction of Carnival in a Flemish town? If the bird's-eye view of the scene is accented, as the perspective encourages one to do, then the scene seems to be the latter, with some revelers pretending to be Lent and her followers and others
[3] On Hoghenberg see Adrien Delen, Histoire de la Gravure dans les Pays-Bas, Volume 2 (Paris, 1935), 91. Delen incorrectly dates Hoghenberg's work after Brueghel's.
[4] On Brueghel's paintings, see Stridbeck, "Combat,'" and also Gustav Glück, "Die Darstellungen des Karnevals und der Fasten von Bosch und Brueghel," in Gedenckbock Vermeylan (Antwerp, 1932), 263–68, both of which reproduce it. The original is in Vienna. The most thorough iconographic study of Brueghel's painting is Claude Gaignebet's "Le combat de Carnival et de Carême de P. Brueghel," Annales: economies, sociétés, civilisations 27 (1972): 313–45, although some of his identifications of popular customs are questionable (as are also those of Stridbeck and Glück). Obviously the fact that Bosch, if we trust surviving copies, dealt with the theme unrealistically does not preclude the possibility that he took actual Carnival-Lent processions as his point of departure.
2. Frans Hoghenberg, Engraving, Fat Carnival with all his Guests Comes Here to Quarrel with Thin Lent (1558).
Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier , Brussels.
Carnival and his partisans, all of them proceeding lackadaisically toward confrontation. If a front-and-center view is taken, then the scene looks more like an allegory in which two unreal personages rule over a never-to-be-found collection of every possible whimsy connected with Carnival (on the left side of the painting) and Lent (on the right). There is no need to adopt one of these alternatives to the exclusion of the other. Like Hoghenberg, Breughel apparently combined some allegory with considerable realistic description. Both artists broke with Bosch's satiric, symbolic style, in which the figures were depicted generically and set in a vaguely surreal cityscape.[5]
Some light can be thrown on the degree to which these depictions reflected performances by looking at the scant records of the latter. At Norwich in 1443 a certain John Gladman, masquerading as "King of Christmas" and mounted on horseback, was followed by "Lenten," another horseman, who had draped himself with herring skins and his horse with oyster shells. These two were preceded by others representing "each month, disguised after the season thereof." In Norwich the New Year began on March 1. Hence the twelve maskers preceding the mock king and Lent represent the months of the old year, "in token that all mirths should end with the twelve months of the year," while Lent follows the mock king "in token that sadness and abstinence of mirth should follow and a holy time." Here Lent, part of whose forty-day fast always fell in March, symbolized arrival of the New Year. He is juxtaposed not to Carnival but to the King of Christmas, but the document of 1443 that I have been quoting refers the parade not to Christmastime but to "Fastengong Tuesday" — that is, mardi gras. At this season such parades, it is asserted, were customary "in any city or borough through all this realm." The whole period from Christmas to the beginning of Lent must have been considered a festive period in Norwich. Later documents show that it was so considered in other parts of Europe, especially in mountainous areas where winter's weather exempted people from work but not pleasure.[6]
[5] The copies of Bosch's works are reproduced in Hanns Swarzenski, "The Battle Between Carnival and Lent," Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) 4.9 (1951): 2–11.
[6] William Hudson and John Tingey, Selected Records of the City of Norwich, Volume I (London, 1906), 345. I have modernized spelling. There are some problems concerning the exact date on which this procession occurred and its political implications. It is probable that, notwithstanding the affirmation of the defendants (Gladman was arrested; the document is legal) about the parade being customary on mardi gras, this parade in 1443 occurred in late January.
Rituals like that at Norwich are rarely documented. Literate people and officials did not find them interesting enough to record except when they caused trouble. But if the sparse notices are accurate, it would seem that although personifying Carnival and Lent and juxtaposing them in combat was a literary tradition dating from the thirteenth century, it was not a parade performed in the streets until the fifteenth or the sixteenth century. Even the Norwich example scarcely counts, because the King of Christmas, not Carnival, is personified vis-à-vis Lent. Combat between Carnival and Lent was developed as written allegory before it became a customary performance like those depicted by Hoghenberg and Brueghel.
By 1300 the two obvious outcomes of confrontation between customary feasting and fasting had been given literary form. In an anonymous Genoese poem written sometime between 1290 and 1320 Carnival meets Friar Friday on a highroad; each summons the other to give up his way of life. Carnival remonstrates with his opponent about the absurdity of his abstemiousness and suggests that they go off to drink together. The friar calmly disagrees, forecasts Carnivals' evil end, and urges Carnival so vividly to repent that he does! An anonymous French poem written about the third quarter of the thirteenth century pictures Fleshliness (Charnaige ) and Lent (Caresme ) not as Christian travelers along the road of life but as rival barons, rich in fiefs and followers, who envy each other's power. A combat takes place in this case after negotiations between personified meats and fishes fail. The battle is long, invoking a vast array of vegetables, animals, fish, and fowl, as well as the two leaders themselves. Charnaige wins with the aid of his ally Christmas (Noël ): here, as later in Norwich, the two festive moments are associated implicitly rather than directly. The spirit of Christmas comes to help the personification of meaty good cheer whose "life" is threatened by the caesura between Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday.[7]
In these literary versions of the conflict, attention to calendrical and agricultural functions of the opposition (Old Year/New Year; winter/spring; abundance/scarcity; fertility/famine) are less important than metaphoric and ideological exploitation of the comic difference between fat and lean. The boundaries of the calendrical occasion, acted out by Norwich's maskers of 1443, are loosened in the Genoese piece:
[7] The two pieces are discussed in detail in Grinberg and Kinser, "Les combats," 66–71, 81–87. Friar Friday symbolizes the weekly fasting urged by the Church, not Lent.
the spirit of fasting and repentance, seizing Carnival, would in theory eliminate any need for the holiday at any time. The power of fleshliness in the French poem also expands beyond the calendrical bounds of the ritual occasion of Carnival. Charnaige rules over the whole year except for the six weeks he deigns to grant Lent. The literary medium frees these pieces from the constraint of fixing the meaning of the antagonists with reference to a particular calendrical occasion or particular ritual performance. Instead, the pieces develop their symbolism in accordance with the wishes and interests of certain social groups. The Genoese confrontation translates the desires of clerical elites, while the French poem reflects a secular and feudal ambience that took church imperatives lightly.[8]
Neither the Genoese nor the French text allows us to suppose that parades and processions like that at Norwich or the one depicted in Hoghenberg's print existed in the thirteenth century. But other features of Carnival celebration in the thirteenth century and following led in that direction. This time was chosen in many parts of Europe as the moment after winter's inactivity to recommence tourneys, ball games, stick-and-stone fights, and every other imaginable outdoor rivalry. Town governments and church councils legislated futilely against these practices (the clergy participated; there were many real-life Friar Johns who loved to fight). The combat between Pantagruel's men and the Sausages in the last part of Rabelais's episode was perhaps calculated to appeal to readers' familiarity with such fracases.[9]
At Nuremberg in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century the city
[8] For an earlier literary depiction of the quarrel between personified Lent and Carnival (in this case both figures have the names that eventually became traditional in Italian, "Carnelvare" and "Quaresima"), see the account of the fictitious letters by Guido Faba written in the 1220s in my "Presentation and Representation: Carnival at Nuremberg, 450–1550," Representations 13 (Winter 1986): 13–4. Faba, unlike the later Genoese and French writers, does not describe a face-to-face confrontation.
[9] Hans Moser, "Städtische Fasnacht [sic ] des Mittelalters," in Masken zwischen Spiel und Ernst (Tübingen, 1967), 151–56, provides examples of these confrontations in thirteenth-and fourteenth-century towns. Similar battles took place in the villages, called "behours" or "bouhours" in France. They usually occurred on the first Sunday in Lent, considered in many places as the last part of Carnival for complex calendrical reasons. Sometimes the fights were carried out not with sticks but around possession of a ball, in a rough ancestor of soccer called "soule." See Roger Vaultier, Le folklore pendant la guerre de Cent Ans d'après les lettres de remission du Trésor de Chartes (Paris, 1965), 45–52.
government seems to have encouraged development of a procession of the city's youthful elite called the Schembartlauf in order to drain off and redirect the informal violence accompanying Carnival. The policy did not entirely succeed. One feature of the Schembartlauf parade was a huge, man-drawn float called "the Hell" depicting castles, ships of fools, lovers' bowers, and so on. It seems to have been the practice to burn the Hell at the end of the parade. It may also have been customary for the patrician Schembart paraders to advance against the Hell and unman it before it was burned. Surviving records do not make this point clear. But an illustration of the procession in 1539 shows some patricians climbing ladders to assault the masked devils and clowns on the float designed as a ship of fools. On this occasion the fight got so out of hand that it spilled over into surrounding streets and led to a near riot.[10]
In 1506 at Bologna on mardi gras morning the first unification in performance of the three elements just traced took place. A spectacle organized for the reigning family on the public square in front of the cathedral included personifications of the two customary occasions, a parade, and a fight. Two men, each followed by a band of soldiers, advanced toward the center of the square, where a banner had been placed. One leader was disguised as Carnival, "a fat man on a fat horse," the other as Lent, "a rich old woman on a thin horse." The two groups struggled to carry off the banner to their "camp," presumably located at either end of the square. In this case, Carnival defeated Lent, implicitly defying the calendar's movement toward Ash Wednesday. But at the large east German town of Zittau in 1505, when Sausage battled Herring, it was Herring who won; Sausage was thrown into the river.[11]
The only other sixteenth-century performance of personified Car-
[10] See Kinser, "Presentation" 19, on the procession of 1539. For a fuller discussion, see Hans Roller, Der Nürnberger Schembartlauf (Tübingen, 1965), 137–43.
[11] See Grinberg and Kinser, "Combats," 65, for Bologna; for Zittau, see Heinrich Kämmel, Geschichte des deutschen Schulwesens im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Leipzig, 1882), 203, unnumbered note. So far as can be determined, no social-class or even guild rivalries were involved in these confrontations. The allegory could not have been ritually repeated if it had signified a traditional subordination in an era where class and guild relationships were very frequently contested. Guilds — especially butchers' guilds, appropriately — did have traditional rites of their own in Carnival, which sometimes led to impromptu fights and even murders.
nival-Lent conflict known at present was, like Bologna's, an elite and official affair. Like Bologna's, too, it was anything but a stiff occasion. At Valencia in 1599, in honor of an approaching royal marriage, none other than the young playwright Lope de Vega played Carnival while a court fool disguised himself as Lent. Attached to the saddle of Carnival's mule were rabbits, partridges, and chickens; attached to Lent's mule were fish of various kinds. In addition, the buffoon wore a hat fringed with eels and sardines. After an entrance parade and salutation to the attending royalty (Lope made a long speech to them in Italian and Spanish) they galloped about each other for a bit, and apparently both fell off their mules. Then their accompanying cavaliers joined in, engaging in somewhat formalized skirmishes "for more than an hour." In this case, neither side seems to have been assigned victory.[12]
Several separately developed elements of Carnival usage seem to have coalesced around 1500 to stimulate the idea of acting out the opposition between Carnival and Lent. The towns with their crowds demanded spectacle, and their varied populations encouraged cross-fertilization of diverging traditions and development of dramatic forms of representation. So the variously described masked figures and literary personages of late medieval times were standardized as the symbols not of this or that aspect of Carnival or Lent — fasting or drinking, eating or praying — but of the occasions as totalities. Giving an overall sense to the occasion meant also sharpening the outcome. In the older literary versions of the combat the end of the battle was usually exile: whether Carnival or Lent won, the other was sure to return in such versions, as the seasons turned. But after 1490 texts appear in which Carnival dies or is killed. A poem called "The Expiration of Carnival," depicting the old fellow on his deathbed, was written in 1493 by a Milanese humanist. A "confession" of Carnival on the scaffold was published in 1516 at Bologna. In 1540 a French play on the combat theme pictures Carnival, in defeat and at the point of death, bidding adieu to his companions and pastimes.[13]
[12] Henri Mérimée, Spectacles et comédiens à Valencia (Toulouse, 1913), 94–97, gives an extensive résumé of the occasion, as described in an unpublished manuscript.
[13] Gaspare Visconti's Il transito di Carnevale was published in his Rithmi (Milan, 1493). See Paolo Camporesi, La maschera di Bertoldo (Turin, 1976), 298–300, on the Processo e confessione del Squaquarante Carneval of 1516. Jehan d'Abundance, Le Testament de Carmentrant, is edited by Jean-Claude Aubailly in his Deux jeux de Carnaval de la fin du moyen âge (Paris, 1978), 71–87.
Unifying, personifying, and dramatizing the occasion changed the focus of comic fun. Instead of being a passing panorama of human frailty and/or enjoyment Carnival's proclivities were individualized and given final, awful meaning by Lent, as in this Florentine play of 1554:
O sad scoundrel, O iniquitous fellow,
O sinner of sinners,
You'll exchange your pleasures
For anxious pains and suffering in Hell![14]
The issue turns inward. Instead of simply haranguing each other about bad habits, as in the Genoese poem (ca. 1300), Carnival's and Lent's behaviors are connected to psychic traits. In Hans Sachs's Nuremberg broadsheet poem, sold at Carnival time in 1540, Carnival becomes so conscience-stricken over the consequences of her behavior that
the Carnival weak and pale
climbed right upon the bridge's rail
And jumped into the Pegnitz [a river at Nuremberg] . . .
Then I went home all full of worries.[15]
I have argued elsewhere that popular no less than elite modes of representing festive behavior changed in three main ways during the Renaissance period. Instead of treating moral issues generically, according to schematized lists of vices and virtues, these representations concerned themselves with individual psychology, which meant among other things that empathy might be displayed, as in the last line of Sachs's verse. Instead of explaining human endeavors and their outcomes as part of the necessary cosmic frame of things, they embedded events, however sketchily, in the sociology of class and community. And third, they "embodied" the psyche and society; that is, they presented the human condition with its fleshliness, not as an aspect of reality that could be diminished or augmented by moral will and thus exchanged for a purely spiritual attitude, but as an inalienable attribute, a precon-
[14] "Rappresentazione e festa di Carnasciale e della Quaresima," in Luigi Manzoni, ed., Libro di Carnevale dei secoli XV e XVI (Bologna, 1881), 290.
[15] Carnival is personified as a bestial woman in Hans Sachs, "Ein Gesprech mit der Fasnacht," in his Werke, ed. Adelbert von Keller and E. Goetze, Volume 5 (Hildesheim, 1964), 298.
dition of spirituality rather than alternative to it. Of course, none of these traits was entirely absent from medieval writings, festive or otherwise. But their preponderance and their conjugated force only emerged in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century.[16]
These traits, strongly exhibited in the Quaresmeprenant-Sausage episode, were neither Rabelais's creation nor his inheritance. He participated in their making. The poems, plays, pictures, and performances cited here, although they exhibit similar general traits, cannot be shown to have directed his pen in writing particular lines or chapters of his episode; they have thus only rarely and partially been cited by others in relation to it.[17] But they are part of the context of his work. They collectively constitute a set of influences. When they are ignored, Rabelais's writing appears more idiosyncratic than it is, and his ingenuity in using the theme cannot be measured.
One recent change in the old plot of Carnival-Lent enmity certainly interested Rabelais. The earliest example of a narrative in which a judicial process is substituted for battle between the two festive occasions seems to be a German play written in the 1480s.[18] Fifty years later Rabelais refers to the schema in his Pantagrueline Prognostication for 1533, written in late 1532. The little brochure parodies the pretensions of almanac writers to foretell the future. "Quaresmeprenant will win his lawsuit; one set of people will disguise themselves to fool the other and will run through the streets like fools gone crazy. Never has such disorder been seen in Nature." Rabelais describes the topsy-turvy triumph of Carnival here. He is not comically inverting calendrical order but simply predicting Quaresmeprenant's power during Carnival season. It will be noted that Rabelais in this earlier publication uses the word Quaresmeprenant unequivocally to mean Carnival. And in the long sentence just before the one quoted he uses Quaresme just as unequivocally to mean Lent, offering another comic prediction that states lean
[16] Kinser, "Presentation," 16–18, 27–28.
[17] A few critics have referred to two of the French literary texts, the thirteenth-century Bataille and sixteenth-century Testament de Carmentrant .
[18] Hans Folz, "Ein Spil von der Fasnacht," discussed in Kinser, "Presentation," 1–41. In addition to two other Carnival plays from Nuremberg that use the lawsuit plot, we have the fragment of a play from a Tyrolean town written by Vigil Raber. In it Carnival is arraigned before the communal court for selling snow as salt, encouraging drunkenness and thievery, and seducing women. See Oswald Zingerle, ed., Sterzinger Spiele nach Aufzeichnungen des Vigil Rabers, Volume I (Vienna, 1886), 237.
facts: "Lard will flee peas in Quaresme; the stomach will go before, while the backside will take precedence in seating?"[19]
Rabelais may have learned during his Italian travels of the lawsuit way of representing Carnival-Lent enmity. A comic narrative published in 1516 at Bologna was called The Law Suit and Confession of the Scoundrel Carnival, and a play published in 1544 at Brescia was entitled Tragi-comedy about the Scoundrel Carnival and My Lady Lent . . . and their Lawyers .[20] Whether or not he himself saw a parade or play pitting one personification against the other, he did experience one element of such personae: their triumphal, larger-than-life quality. When Rabelais in the Fourth Book calls Quaresmeprenant "half a giant;" he refers to a common feature of contemporary Carnival festivities: the grand and the menacing were of course spectacularly attractive. In sixteenth-century Nuremberg's Schembartlauf parades a recurrent figure was a giant wildman, depicted in the manuscript illustrations of this parade as nearly half again as tall as a normal person, carrying an uprooted tree over one shoulder with a normal-sized man bound to it.[21]
Some chapters after the Quaresmeprenant-Sausage episode in the Fourth Book Rabelais describes a Carnival giant that he had probably seen during the 1530s when he worked as a physician in Lyon. The giant, a puppet, was called Chewcrust (Maschecroutte). It was
a wooden statue on a tall brightly-gilt pole . . . badly carved and clumsily painted . . . a monstrous, ridiculous, hideous effigy, a scarer of little children [Quaresmeprenant was called, in a similar phrase, a "whipper of small children"]. Its eyes were bigger than its belly and its head larger than the rest of its body. It had an ample pair of wide and horrible jaws, well provided with teeth, both upper and lower; and these were made to gnash horribly together by means of a little cord concealed in the gilt pole.[22]
[19] PP , 2, 920–21. Of course, I am not denying that Rabelais might have invented the lawsuit idea himself, without knowledge that others had already used it.
[20] See Grinberg and Kinser, "Combats " 91–92. It is possible that "avocati" in the title of the Brescia play, whose text I have not seen, means not "lawyers" but simply "advocates, supporters."
[21] See the illustrations in Kinser, "Presentation" 9, 15. Why does Rabelais say "half " a giant (QL , 29, 642)? Is it because Quaresmeprenant, although depicted as larger than normal, is not superhuman but merely a frightening member of our own species? At the same time Rabelais's reference may be ironic: this person is not even a successful Carnival bug-a-boo, totally gigantic.
[22] QL , 59, 722.
The description sounds similar to what is seen in manuscript illuminations of the Kinderfresser (Devourer of Children), a wickerwork giant that constituted the "Hell" float in 1508, 1511, and 1524 at Nuremberg. At Metz in 1498 a wickerwork giant was carried in carnival "with a huge head . . . and large rings in his ears." His eyes rolled in his head, while the latter moved from side to side, a thing "very terrifying to see" according to a contemporary writer.[23] Carnival monsters carrying to an extreme the voracity associated with Carnival were very much part of the sixteenth-century scene.
Into this relatively new framework of spectacularized conflict Rabelais poured his usual mix of allusions to contemporary events and ancient authors, merry tales, proverbs, and everyday pastimes such as the Lenten game referred to in the prologue. Particularly conspicuous in the Quaresmeprenant-Sausage episode are an excursus on the properness of proper names that burlesques the issues raised in Plato's Cratylus, references to several Old Testament terms, ample use of Erasmus's Adagia, and allusions to Lucian's True History . Such elite-cultural items are skillfully mixed with popular-cultural references. Barbara Bowen has described Rabelais's use of terms and images from French popular farces and proverbs in this episode, especially those concerning tripe sausages and eels (andouilles, anguilles ).[24] The most extensive and literal use of a popular-cultural source in the episode comes from a book published anonymously in 1538 in imitation of Rabelais's best-seller Pantagruel, which was called The Voyage and Navigation of Panurge, disciple of
[23] See the account by Philippe de Vigneulles republished in Martine Grinberg, "Des Géants au Carnival de Metz en 1498: innovation folklorique et politique urbaine," in Etudes et documents du Cercle royal d'histoire et d'archéologie d'Ath et de la région, Volume 5 (Ath, 1983), 320. Roller, Der Nürnberger Schembartlauf, 119, reproduces a sixteenth-century manuscript illustration of Nuremberg's Kinderfresser .
[24] Screech, Rabelais, 362, 372–78, provides good indications of the elitecultural sources and some popular-cultural sources for this episode. Barbara Bowen has written two complementary articles on the episode: "L'épisode des Andouilles: esquisse d'une méthode de lecture," in Halina Lewicka, ed., Le comique verbal en France au seizième siècle (Warsaw, 1981), 111–26, and "Lenten Eels and Carnival Sausages," L'esprit créateur 21 (1981): 12–25. Bowen sees a "mixture" of Carnival and Lent features in both of Rabelais's antagonists, Quaresmeprenant and the Sausages. She concludes, largely in accord with Alban Krailsheimer (see n. 27), that the episode as a whole is "a comment upon the doctrinal confusion which accompanies religious discord" ("Lenten Eels," p. 25).
Pantagruel . In this book Panurge leads a ship into a Sea of Ferocious Beings (mer des Farouches ), where he and his men, landing on an island, encounter tripe sausages who swarm over the sailors, tearing off their noses. Panurge and his men repulse the attack of these castrating warriors, who would have all been killed except that they jumped into a mustard river that ran nearby. These incidents are used by Rabelais in his episode, as we will see.[25]
A number of incidents and terms in the Carnival-Lent episode refer to contemporary issues. In fact the conflict between Quaresmeprenant and the Sausages has sometimes been considered an allegory of the hostility between Catholics and Protestants. But if Quaresmeprenant represents Catholicism, he represents it only partially, as if he were drawn to the scale of the church's most bigoted leaders. If the Sausages represent contemporary Protestants, then Rabelais has chosen to portray only the most hot-headed and belligerent among them. Specific references to Swiss Protestants are certainly allegorized in some of the Sausage "tribes," as was already pointed out in the late seventeenth century by one of Rabelais's editors.[26] Alban Krailsheimer has suggested that the episode represents a closely worked-out allegory of the war of 1546–1547 by Emperor Charles V against the Protestant states grouped in the Smalkaldic League: Charles is Quaresmeprenant, and the Sausages are the Swiss and South German allies. There is no doubt that some reference to these events is included, but such references to contemporary affairs do not provide the basic pattern for either the episode's unfolding or its characters.
Rabelais's mixed modes of representation and the broad range of his sources obviously correspond to and identify the mixed and varied au
[25] See the edition by Guy Demerson and Christian Lauvergnat-Gagnière, Le disciple de Pantagruel (Paris, 1982.). When and how Rabelais first became aware of the book is not known, but it probably was not later than 1547, when the Disciple was published at the end of Pantagruel (i.e., at the end of volume 2 of a three-volume set including G, P, and TL ) by Claude La Ville in Valence, France, thus pulling readers toward the false belief that it was by the same anonymous author as Pantagruel . La Ville is the publisher whose title page woodcut to Gargantua is reproduced in Fig. 1.
[26] See "Remarques de Mr Le Motteux sur les Oeuvres" in Oeuvres, ed. Jean Bernard, Volume 3 (Amsterdam, 1741), 98. This interpretation and Le Motteux's Rabelaisian criticism generally are explored in ch. 6.
[27] Alban Krailsheimer, "The Andouilles of the Quart Livre, " in François Rabelais; ouvrage publié pour le 4e centenaire de sa mort, 1554–1953 (Geneva, 1953), 226–32.
dience to which he wished to appeal. The pose of the author-narrator in the prologue is that of a jovial and benevolent Everyman, whose works are nonpartisan and therefore objectionable only to the narrow-minded. But how, with all this mixing, did he achieve not only coherence but also the narrative power that comes from pulling words and incidents together in accordance with an overriding theme and purpose?