5—
Perversity and Patriarchy

Why is the leader of the Sausages a woman? Xenomanes has already reported that all Sausages are women. Strange island indeed! The queen's name is Niphleseth. In the Brief Clarification of Some Obscure Expressions in the Fourth Book, the glossary attached to some copies of the 1552 edition of the Fourth Book, Niphleseth is explained as "the virile member, Hebrew."^[1] In fact the "double," treacherous, half-human, half-animal nature of the Sausages, played upon throughout the episode, is supplemented by their sexual duplicity. Melusine, ancestor of the people of Poitou, explains Alcofribas in his defense of the mythic grandeur of the Sausages, "had a woman's body down to the prickpurse  . . .  the rest below was serpentine sausage or perhaps Sausage-like serpent," Male-female ambivalence is insured in French by the gender of the words involved; sausage is feminine, and serpent is masculine, so that the phrase "andouille serpentine ou bien serpent andouillicque " jumps back and forth over the gender boundary. "The Scythian nymph Ora similarly had a body which was half woman and half sausage. But for all that Jupiter thought her so beautiful that he slept with her and had a handsome boy by her named Colaxes."^[2] Food and sex are associated by means of the symbol of the serpent.

Association of andouille with the male member was commonplace. Playing the changes between male referent and feminine grammatical gender had of course been exploited before Rabelais, as for example, in the late fifteenth-century Joyous Sermon of Saint Ham and Saint Tripe-Sausage . Brother Ham and Sister Sausage were viciously murdered one day, so the bibulous preacher says in this comic monologue. One was salted, the other was hung, and both were put up for sale in the market by the murderers. Among those who decided to buy was a "silly girl, who for her pan took Saint Sausage and put her in her lap." Saint

[1] BD, 765.

[2] QL, 38, 666.

Sausage of course is "propitious to females," for the "spirit" of this saint enters into the body of devout maidens with great alacrity and stays there, "piteously" returning to the flesh, until one day the girls have a baby.^[3]

Women and also children are treated at several points in the Rabelaisian books as metaphorically equivalent to the male member. It is doubtful that Rabelais had anything more specific in mind than comic evocation of the generally accepted patriarchy of his time when he has Gargantua exclaim over the corpse of his wife Badebec, who dies in giving birth to Pantagruel: "Oh Badebec my darling, my friend, my little coney (petit con ) — though hers was a good three acres and two rods in extent — my tenderling, my codpiece, my shoe, my slipper." The baby Pantagruel is similarly addressed in the same passage as "my little ballock, my potkin, how pretty you are!"^[4] Women, like babies, are the decoration and pride of the male body. They are destined to serve male bodily needs through impregnation and child bearing. Pantagruel kindly offers Queen Niphleseth as his parting gift "a pretty little knife of Perche manufacture? Women, even when named for the male member, lack that little something.^[5]

This is not very surprising in the male universe of the Pantagruelians, where Panurge's sexy stories and pranks and Friar John's obscene oaths are welcomed with giant laughter. But there seems to be something else involved than comic play with lexical gender for the greater glory of males in the emphasis on the Sausages' femininity at the beginning and end of this second half of the Carnival-Lent episode. (The middle part of this half does not mention the Sausages' femininity: the weasel-like Sausage spies and the fierce Sausage warriors are not treated as Amazons.) If such there is, it is probably not to be found at that psycho-physiological level that is exploited in portraying Quaresmeprenant.

[3] The text of the Sermon Joyeux de Saint Jambon et de Sainte Andouille (1460? published 1520) is edited by Jellie Koopmans, Quatre Sermons Joyeux (Geneva, 1984). I have excerpted from and paraphrased lines 178–84 and 197–206.

[4] P, 3, 203. Another more complex equation of woman with the male member is played with in Rabelais's prologue to the Fourth Book where the peasant Ballocker's coingnée (QL, Pr, 548: literally, hatchet head and synecdochically the whole hatchet, head and handle) is explicated not only as "la femelle bien A poinct et souvent gimbretilletolletée" (QL, Pr, 553) but also, at a subtextual level, as Ballocker in erection. See ch. 9 for further comment on this example.

[5] QL, 42, 675. "Knife," like "serpent ," was probably used polysemically here. Knives were offered by Cartier to Canadian Indians. And gifts were usual among feudal sovereigns as a seal to negotiations.

The Sausages tend to jump to false conclusions. It would have been easy and comically effective to have added that such behavior is understandable because the Sausages are nothing but brainless women, thus associating psychology and physiology. But no one ventures the reflection.

The rationale behind the Sausages' femininity can be found in a different direction, when one considers the peculiar sexuality of Quaresmeprenant in connection with theirs. Only two references to his sexual behavior appear to the modern reader. When Quaresmeprenant daydreams, it is phalluses "flying and creeping along a wall." When he copulated with Midlent, he begot "only double fasts and locative adverbs"; whether this hints that he was at least fertile in piety or more darkly suggests that he was entirely sterile, Quaresmeprenant's reproductive activity can certainly be said to have produced strange effects. Several other sexual references were perhaps clear to Rabelais's contemporaries, or at least to doctors among them. According to Guy Demerson, the qualification of the monster as "fuzzy-haired and doubly-tonsured" indicates that his head and body hair had fallen out due to syphilis. Again, Quaresmeprenant's arsehole is "like a crystal mirror."^[6] Anatole Le Double states that physicians in Rabelais's time gave the name "crystalline" to "anal syphilis" or "Ganymede's syphilis."^[7] This trait would specify the monster as both syphilitic and homosexual. One recalls Pantagruel's furious denunciation of Anti-Nature's children as catamites or homosexuals.^[8] However literally Rabelais meant his descriptions to be taken, his indications of Quaresmeprenant's sexual behavior categorize

[6] The references to Quaresmeprenant's characteristics are in QL, 32, 649; 30, 645; 29, 642; and 31, 646. See Rabelais, Ouevres complètes, ed. Guy Demerson (Paris, 1973), 661, n. 8.

[7] Doctor Le Double's Rabelais anatomiste et physiologiste is one of the strangest in the long history of Rabelaisian criticism. In the course of three hundred pages he painstakingly shows by means of words and superbly drawn designs how, with respect to the first fifty-nine internal anatomical parts and their analogies in QL, 30, the shapes of the ordinary things that Rabelais mentions correspond to the organs in question. The demonstrations require immense technical and antiquarian knowledge and are not always convincing. In the context of his often recondite associations, it is comical to read on 411 that Le Double decided against undertaking similar demonstrations for Quaresmeprenant's external anatomy because Rabelais's analogies seemed to him in this case so farfetched ("si risquées"). The information about Ganymede's syphilis is given on 412, n. 5, where Le Double cites a medical work published in 1612.

[8] QL, 32, 651. French chattemite is derived from Latin Catamitus, which in turn is a corrupt form of Ganymedes .

it as obsessively phallocentric. In light of these details the reference in Xenomanes's first description to the monster's "Lanternland origin" probably symbolizes not merely his distraction of mind but also his sexual self-involvement, a trait that perverts the contemporary procreative ideals of patriarchy.^[9]

Phallocentrism was typical of that century of codpieces; Rabelais's Third Book might be read as a psychoanalytic study before the letter of how phallocentric self-absorption — in this instance Panurge's — prevents commitment to marriage and marital reproduction. Does Rabelais mean to suggest that the Sausages' faithless impetuosity, their whimsical worship of themselves in the form of a jewel-like pig, is a corresponding female deformation, making procreatively stable marriage with them equally impossible?^[10] In that case Rabelais points to the rule and the exception at once when he notes that the 78,000 females shipped off as hostages to his father Gargantua "died" without issue at Paris except for the queen's daughter, the "young Niphleseth," who was given in marriage to a man of wealth and worth, whereupon "she made several handsome children, for which may God be praised."^[11]

The sexual level of symbolism is as appropriate to the festive context as are those levels that construct Quaresmeprenant as a terrifying puppet and the Sausage-people as comic fighters. People dealt with the ban on sexual activity during Lent by accenting it during Carnival.^[12] At the level of character and incident, of course, the Sausages' femininity

[9] See the account of Quaresmeprenant's first description in ch. 3.

[10] Françoise Charpentier, "La Guerre des Andouilles, Pantagruel, IV, 35–42," in Etudes seizièmistes offerts à V. L. Saulnier (Geneva, 1980), 133–35, emphasizes the "double" sexual nature of the Andouilles-Serpens and concludes that their "matriarchy" represents a "bisexualité  . . .  close et stérile," in which reproduction is carried on without males, so that this kingdom represents a threat to male supremacy. But Rabelais's representation of the Sausages and especially of their queen hardly seems menacing. Moreover reproduction without the intervention of males is given positive meaning in Pantagruel's discourse on Nature and Anti-Nature: "Physis (c'est Nature) en sa première portée enfanta Beaulté et Harmonie sans copulation charnelle, comme de soy-mesmes est grandement féconde et fertile" (QL, 32, 650). Anti-Nature copulates in the usual heterosexual way and produces disharmony.

[11] QL, 42, 676.

[12] Hans Folz's Ein Spil (ca. 1480–1490), for example, which claims to survey Carnival behavior among the different classes of people at Nuremberg, emphasizes licentious sexuality among all ranks. See Kinser, "Presentation," 10–13.

needs no such procreative rationale. Rabelais probably borrowed the idea of making the Sausages uniformly feminine from his farcical source, The Disciple of Pantagruel . There, although neither the sex of the furry "fierce people" (Farouches ) is mentioned nor is that of the nose-biting sausages whom Panurge and his friends encounter next, the inhabitants of Lanternland are identified as female:

We pushed on night and day until we arrived in Lanternland, the country  . . .  which Lucian mentions in his book of true histories. It was mid-May, the day when their queen gave a grand festival in honor of her birthday  . . .  for on that day all the lanterns of the world were assembled, rather like the Franciscans in their chapter-general, to treat of their business and affairs . . . . They [elles] all came in procession  . . .  two by two, singing so melodiously that one could not imagine hearing sweeter harmony.

The voyagers are invited to the queen's banquet. There they see the "noble" lanterns and queen dressed in fine dear ivory, while lanterns of less rank wear robes made of pork and beef bladders. Some are clothed in fabrics made from intestines, but still others appear in dresses made from ordinary cloth. The anonymous author makes no explicit comment on the lanterns' femininity (la lanterne is feminine in gender), but the details emphasize the traditional feminine perquisites of grace and beauty, a beauty by turns noble and grotesque, bizarre and ordinary.^[13]

This passage was probably also the inspiration for Rabelais's use of "lanterning" in the nonsexual sense mentioned earlier. The Council of Trent will be a great and useless meeting of well-robed luminaries, similar to the Chapters General of Rabelais's former monastic order, the Franciscans. It will be very beautiful and very empty, glowing without substance, like women do from the patriarchal point of view.^[14]

Textual and intertextual studies clarify the puzzles proposed by Rabelais's text. They also augment them. One sees more clearly, for example, the rhetorical contrast between the groups of chapters devoted to the two kinds of islanders. In the Quaresmeprenant section every new element adds from a different point of view to what is already suspected about the monster's ominous character. The meaning of the

[13] Disciple, 29–33.

[14] See the first description of Quaresmeprenant, as analyzed in ch. 3. The references to Lanternland in CL, 34–42, 878–99, with their emphasis on stonily glowing luminosity, owe much to this passage in the Disciple also (see esp. 30–31).

figure seems, through extensive enumeration, to approach full definition. In the Sausage section, however, each new perspective disrupts the previous attempt to see, understand, and define. Are they animals or human? men or women? food or warriors? friendly or fierce? In the end this dissemination of meaning seems to be reversed by the philosophic conversation between Pantagruel and Niphleseth. The Sausages are after all sausages, who through mustard and mardi gras achieve the ends for which they have been created. The growing concentration of meaning around the figure of Quaresmeprenant, however, does not lead to any revelation. The last detail about him in the text is in consonance with his half-mad perverted sexual character, but it does not wind up matters.

The Sausage-queen tells Pantagruel during their peace negotiations that her spies have reported that Quaresmeprenant has landed on a beach of Ferocious Island, not to make war, but to inspect the urine of physeters.^[15] Once more Quaresmeprenant is shown moving toward Lent by associating with Lent's traditional allies, the fishy creatures of the sea. But at the same time this report reinforces our sense of how silly the Sausages are, for the inspection on land of the excretory products of seagoing whales hardly seems likely. Is Quaresmeprenant looking perhaps at the dead physeter that Pantagruel's men pulled up on a beach of Ferocious Island? If he is doing something the Sausages suppose is the inspection of urine — playing the doctor of whom he is frequently in need — is he not looking at the Leviathan's sexual parts? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Even Pantagruel's identification of the monster as one of Anti-Nature's children only renders him more powerfully enigmatic.

Rabelais's rhetorical strategy is to lead the reader to distinguish between the manner and the matter of his discourse. When he says something relatively simple, as with the Sausages, his manner is rhetorically elaborate, delaying definition or offering ambiguous, incomplete perceptions. When he has something complex to communicate, he writes with seeming sharpness, accumulating exact details. Matter and manner conflict, or at any rate they seem to flow in opposite directions. Can the reasons for the choice of such paradoxical rhetoric be found within the text, or between the text and its textual sources and parallels? Yes, at least some reasons can be found textually and intertextually by iden-

[15] QL, 42, 675.

tifying the particular narrative modes used in the two halves of the episode.

In the case of Quaresmeprenant Rabelais considers the differences between Carnival and Lent as a kind of dialectic opposition. He examines this dialectic imaginatively, that is, in terms of concrete images and fictive representations, rather than philosophically, abstractly, or pragmatically as, for example, a rationalization of these occasions' rituals or as a set of suggestions about these occasions' proper celebration. Yet here as throughout the novels he inserts contemporary references into the fictive frame. The text is not didactic, but this does not mean that it does not judge and condemn and hence by implication — but only by implication — also admire and advocate.

The second half of the episode is not a dialectic exploration, imaginatively or otherwise. It is more simply and lightheartedly an arabesque on Carnival behavior. Its confusions and ambivalences conjoin rather than conflict as they did in the Quaresmeprenant section. One means of maintaining this harmonious rather than conflictual development of the latter part of the narrative, in spite of all its surprises and digressions, is clear maintenance of the Pantagruelians' human status vis-à-vis these islanders who are in turn furry animals, fishy serpents, brave warriors, and a one-sexed polity. By bringing the Pantagruelians into close and Carnival-prescribed contact with the Sausages, the latter are constantly being pulled back, in spite of all their changes, to what they epidermoidally are, food for men.

This basic reference to sausage food is why the symbols in the second half of the episode converge rather than grow in disharmony. Friar John's cooks employ not a Trojan horse but a sow in their struggles; the Sausages are saved by a motherly flying pig who casts down celestial balm. A big pig's "intestines" (the hidden cooks) fight against little pig tripe, and the pig tripe in turn is saved by heavenly pig essence. Just as was the case with the huge, composite body of Quaresmeprenant, the meaning of the Pantagruelians' visit to Ferocious Island is finally summed up in a sensuously concrete image, a gleaming transformation of Carnival food.

The difference between the two personifications around which Rabelais builds this narrative is thus maintained. Quaresmeprenant is the humanization, monstrous though it be, of an abstraction of a ritual occasion or rather transition between two rituals conventional among men. Sausages are humanizations, silly though they be, of something

eminently concrete and essential to men, food. Aside from their formal status as parallel personifications, their similarity is only negative. They define something from which, in different ways and for different reasons, human beings — here the Pantagruelians — must differentiate themselves.

Carnival food, or more grandly, the place of food in human existence, its role in the body, psyche, and behavior, is the intellectual thread binding the two halves of the episode together. By the time the Pantagruelians arrive at Ferocious Island two narrative dynamics have been set in motion: on one hand the puzzles engendered by amalgamating, while not mixing, characteristics of Carnival and Lent in a single monstrous being; on the other the larger problem of relating Lenten rules and Carnival pleasures to human desires and human needs that flow right across the ritual boundary between Carnival and Lent and indeed expand through the whole year and through people's whole existence. How indeed should or can people deal with delicious, delectable, desirable, devourable food? At Carnival time men become so voracious that they may confuse themselves with the principle of eating. They may become very nearly like the Sausage-people, worshiping food as a deity, so that they too come to seem like nothing more than an intestinal integument, a skin stretched tight by stuffing.

The Pantagruelians begin their Carnival battle in this voracious manner: "But for God's special intervention the whole race of Sausages would have been exterminated by our soldiers" — exterminated, all chopped up, eaten or prepared for eating by the noble cooks.^[16] But then they stop. The pork bird appears, the Sausages throw down their arms, and Pantagruel orders a halt to the piggish butchery by his men.

Is this intervention and halt just knightly grace, an inconsequential narrative incident, or is Rabelais suggesting that at least Pantagruel has a sense of proper restraint vis-à-vis food, even in Carnival? How are the Pantagruelians different from the Gastrolators, "worshipers of the belly," who are denounced by Pantagruel and by the narrator at the end of the Fourth Book for their savory sacrifices to their god Gaster? The long list of dainties that the Gastrolators shovel into Gaster's gullet would grace the best Pantagruelian table. But Gaster represents the principle of stomachic necessity, not alimentary enjoyment. The Gastrolators do him honor in the wrong way. Like the Sausages' reverence

[16] QL, 41, 673.

for their gemlike pork bird, the followers of Gaster worship a part of nature as if it were divine: "Gaster confessed himself no god, but a poor, vile, pitiful creature." The Gastrolators, raising this creature on high, distort the significance of the lord of the belly in order to serve their own proclivity, which is — quite in contrast to Gaster's frenetic inventiveness — to do nothing. The Gastrolators fabricate a Carnival puppet whose mouth clacks open and shut, as if ever seeking food. They carry this image of a terrifying eater in triumphal parade in the mistaken idea that it represents the essence of Gaster.^[17]

The parallel between the distorted worship of the Gastrolators and the idolatry of the Sausages for their pork bird sets off the Pantagruelians from both.^[18] Pantagruelians eat pigs but do not worship them. Pantagruelians tipple and talk; they do not shovel dainty foods and fine wines into some ideational maw. Queen Niphleseth calls the pork bird a divine idea, but the narrator calls it a monster.^[19] It seems that there is a proper limit to eating, and especially to preoccupation with eating, even in Carnival.

Within the terms of the Carnival-Lent episode the story of the pork bird sets this limit in one direction and the story of Nature and Anti-Nature sets it in another. Like the Gastrolators' puppet, the pork bird is a misrepresentation of the natural impulse to eat well and joyffully, just as Anti-Nature is a misrepresentation of the natural harmony and measure exhibited in conduct guided by "common sense and good judgment." Lack of the latter qualities, characteristic of the children of Anti-Nature according to Pantagruel, means that a creature like Quaresmeprenant is at odds with the way the natural universe is constructed. This monster with his voraciously meat-filled dreaming forever moves toward Lent because of his lack of natural sense — which

[17] QL, 60, 729, and QL, 59, 722: this is the puppet the narrator compares to Chewcrust in the Lyon Carnival parade. Rabelais's unspoken equation of excessive eating with Carnival behavior is carried further by presenting the Gastrolators as maskers: "Rien ne faisans, poinct ne travaillans  . . .  craignans  . . .  le ventre offenser et emmaigrir. Au reste, masquez, desguiséz et vestuz tant estrangement que c'estoit belle chose . . . . Je vous asceure qu'en la vesture de ces Gastrolatres coquillons ne veismes moins de diversité et desguisement." QL, 58, 720–21.

[18] The parallel sets off the Pantagruelians, but perhaps not the Pantagruelians' cooks or Friar John: I read into the text here when I assign this attribute to all. Pantagruelians.

[19] QL, 42, 676.

makes Pantagruel, Rabelais's personification of large girthed wisdom, so angry that he loses his temper.

Pantagruel's angry ill humor seems to violate Pantagruelism, explained in the Prologue to the Fourth Book as "a certain gaiety of spirit, pickled in scorn of everyday vicissitudes."^[20] The Pantagruelians usually follow this rule, moving from one island to another in the Fourth Book not to judge and denounce, not to defeat the movement toward Lent or the distortion of Carnival, but to represent a mode of living. They depict not an alternative morality but another morale, another way of living that is embodied in their conversational camaraderie, bubbling talk, and bibulous eating. The prologue's gaily ambivalent greeting expresses the same embodied, active wisdom: "Bien et beau s'en va Quaresme, " how pleasantly Lent is passing by — and passing away!

Lent is accepted as a human convention, however unnatural — and indeed however unsupernatural — it may have seemed to Rabelais. Neither Carnival nor Lent, one realizes in retrospect, is attacked as such in the long episode that denounces their false idolators. But this does not mean that they are both affirmed. In the gayest and most Pantagrueline of his extant letters, Rabelais invites a friend to visit him during Lent of 1542: "You will arrive, of course, not when it pleases you to do so but when you are brought here by the will of the great, good, and merciful God who never created Lent." God did not create Lent, though he did create Lenten fare:

salads, herrings, cod, carp, pike, dace,  . . .  stickle-back, etc.; also good wines, and especially the one  . . .  which we are saving here for your coming like a sang gréal [holy grail? royal/real blood?]^[21] and like a second, no, a quintessence. Ergo veni Domine et noli tardare [so come, sir, and don't delay].^[22]

Both Lent and Carnival have their pleasures. Mardi gras, instead of standing as a regrettable boundary between them, is from this perspec-

[20] QL, 545. Pantagruelism is discussed at length in ch. 8.

[21] See ch. 4, n. 41.

[22] "Or vous le ferez, non quand il vous playra, mais quand le vouloir vous y apportera de celluy grand bon piteux Dieu, lequel ne créa oncques le quaresme, ouy bien les sallades, arans, merluz, carpes, bechetz, dars, umbrines, ablettes, rippes, etc.; item les bons vins, singulièrement celui de veteri jure enucleando, lequel on guarde icy à vostre venue comme un sang gréal et une seconde, voyre quinte essence. Ergo veni, Domine, et noli tardare " (L, 1007). Note that Rabelais does not suggest defying the rule of no meat in Lent: vegetables and fishes are all the fare.

tive their common preserver. Indeed that is the role of noble Mardi Gras in Rabelais's tale. This lord never appears to fight for or against any combatants. How could Mardi Gras actively injure his namesake, Quaresmeprenant, or abandon those who take his idea as their god, however treacherous they may be? Mardi Gras stands symbolically outside the conflict because he stands temporally between its two poles. For him to exist, both poles, both kinds of ritual allegiance, must endure. Mardi Gras is there, like the Pantagruelians, to give distance and perspective to this human comedy. The Pantagruelians are Mardi Gras's vassals; they are not neutral in the fray, for only mardi gras's comedy, not Ash Wednesday's gravity, creates a space within which both Lent's and Carnival's pretensions can be satirized by placing on parade — as in Hoghenberg's print — the two sides' followers with their different kinds of silliness.

The interpretation of the Carnival-Lent episode suggested here affirms its festive frame, its popular-cultural representation of sociability, and its comic ideology. These things do not necessarily go together. Eminent Rabelaisian scholars dealing with this extraordinarily commented and interpreted group of chapters have affirmed or denied one, two, and all three of them. If, however, ideology, style, and form all do go together, then the reader must set to one side both commentaries that end by deriving high humanist truths from the episode and those that see it as linguistically self-enclosed and metaphysically somber. In spite of the garish and gruesome visions they include, these chapters are gaily written and antimetaphysical in tenor.

Carnival's rituals articulate the episode. The whole of this "performance" takes place on mardi gras, insofar as it may be supposed to be a burlesque translation of contemporary parades and games. Carnivalesque attitudes provide the basis of representation of most characters and activities in the episode. But Carnival is not affirmed morally. Quaresmeprenant's psychic excess is a horror while that of the Sausages is just silly, but both lead to catastrophe: the merry Sausages are always being caught by their old enemy, while Quaresmeprenant finds himself weeping ducks in onion sauce. Rabelais draws attention to the inversive logic binding each to each. Thus, although he transforms nearly every element of the old combat theme, he nevertheless preserves the schema. And although he derives the qualities of representation almost entirely

from the Carnival, secular side and scarcely at all from Lenten, churchly views, the comic ideology supporting the representation affably accepts both kinds of institution, even with their common tendency to encourage excess. Both institutions are necessary to provide the dynamics driving either of them. The dynamics are not innately evil; they become so only when linked to a psychology of excess that has other foundations.

No study of the purely textual and intertextual aspects of Carnival-Lent relations is likely to discover this way of generating the episode. Literary scholars have for three centuries been more willing to twist verbal meanings to provide a semantically smooth text than to look beyond it for keys to its paradoxes. It is the changing behavioral context of Carnival and Lenten observance which allows understanding of its puzzling representations, and not anything discoverable on the printed page alone. Rabelais's pages pose themselves as part of that behavior, interacting with them as well as reflecting upon them. The Rabelaisian text is both centripetal in its energies, creating its own intratextual spirals, and centrifugal, reaching outward with a smile and sometimes with an oath.^[23]

The passage listing the names of Friar John's cook soldiers is introduced by Pantagruel's disquisition about the accuracy of names in relation to things. It is a long parody of Plato's search in the Cratylus for a way in which to assure that words indicate the things they designate. "See the Cratylus of the divine Plato," recommends Pantagruel, when his men are discussing their chances of victory against the Sausages. "You'll see [in such books] how the Pythagoreans conclude from their names and numbers that Patroclus ought to have been slain by Hector, Hector by Achilles, Achilles by Paris, and Paris by Philoctetes. My mind is set in an utter whirl when I think of Pythagoras' amazing discov-

[23] Shifts in the representation of Carnival in the sixteenth century were the main subject of the latter part of ch. 2 above. Rabelais's representations were intertwined with these changing representations, and both of them were in turn affected by nonfestive social and cultural conditions. The idea of three-cornered, reciprocal influence between social trends, cultural traditions, and specific texts (or other specific artifacts of art, science, or philosophy) is, I take it, at least one part of what is coming to be called the "new historicism" in literary studies. Contrary to the expressed fears of some, it has nothing to do with a rejection of textual and intertextual, let alone of semiotic and structural approaches to literature. See further comment on historicism in n. 4, After-word.

ery."^[24] The names of Friar John's cooks are all cratylic in this sense, truly designating what they do. Yet the episode as a whole enjoins the opposite lesson: the Sausages behave as if they were human  . . .  or animal  . . .  or eels  . . .  or women, and Quaresmeprenant, "Carnival" behaves like Lent. Language exceeds and rebels against the uses to which humans would put it: the writer's materials are chaotic. Rabelais's parody of the Carnival-Lent genre is simultaneously a parody of Pantagruel's cratyfism, of the fashionable Platonism of contemporary humanists, and of the intellectualism which supposes that labeling processes could exhaustively exhibit the real.^[25]

Instead of allegorizing human behavior, as medieval authors had done, Rabelais humanizes allegory. Did the gradual loss of transcendental surety, that system of cosmic correspondences between supernatural, human, and subhuman spheres, require this shift? Whether or not that is so, it is certain that among fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers, the more they substituted concrete psychological and social description for allegorical typology, the more they sought to compensate for the consequent loss of religious authority with semireligious or frankly secular moralism.

A text communicates in a number of ways simultaneously. At the semantic level medieval texts tended to order their meanings like layers

[24] QL, 37, 662. The examples Pantagruel mentions here are taken not from the Cratylus but from Cornelius Agrippa's De vanitate scientiarum, whose title might be paraphrased as "On the emptiness of knowledge-systems," a hilariously undermining fact in itself for anyone who recognized Rabelais's source.

[25] Rabelais's concern with cratylism has been explored by Screech, Rabelais, 377–97; by François Rigolot, "Cratylisme et pantagruelisme: Rabelais et le statut du signe," Etudes rabelaisiennes 13 (1976): 115–32; and very briefly but with equal perceptiveness by Guy Demerson in "Les calembours de Rabelais," in Le comique verbal en France au seizième siècle, ed. Halina Lewicka (Warsaw, 1981), 88–90.

The same can be said for neither Vernon L. Saulnier's reflections on this cratylic interlude nor indeed for the other parts of his long disquisition on the Carnival-Lent episode in Rabelais dans son enquête: étude sur le Quart et le Cinquième Livre (Paris, 1982), 87–100. Saulnier treats Quaresmeprenant, the Physeter, and the Sausages in separate chapters of his book, devoting most space to the Sausages. By means of a remarkable series of circularly allegorical arguments, he concludes that the name of the Sausages, andouilles, is probably intended to evoke the Greek verb endoiadzein, to doubt, because this meaning of andouilles best unifies the politico-religious themes of German-Swiss war and Lantern "discipline" with Pantagruel's discourse about the cratylic character of proper names.

in a cake, each separated from the others — literal, moral, allegorical, eschatological, anagogical — all covered and made coherent by the frosting of theological postulates. In early modern times texts began to develop semantically as a set of perspectives, some consistent and others inconsistent with each other. None of these perspectives represents Truth, and, because they might be infinitely multiplied, defining truth as their totality would seem irrelevant. The perspectives these new fictions offer seem designed less to add up than to filter out dogma.^[26] Alcofribas undermines the integrity of the plot with his parodic pose of reliable eyewitness authority, Pantagruel undermines his exemplary status with his credulity, his lanternism, and his humanist pedantry, and Rabelais, the author — can we trust him? Just as far as we are willing to believe the make-believe in the prologue, the bonhomie that greets readers as if they had just stepped in for a glass of wine during the current Lenten season.

The special advantage of festive, popular, comic modes of discourse and performance is that they thrive upon differences. Differences, not uniformity, provision the human comedy. Joining his writing to these modes, Rabelais multiplies perspectives. The truths this writer has to offer can only be seized obliquely and never quite clearly: they have more than one meaning. They are human truths, not divine, and so they shift their meaning with the human context — as Carnival revelers do, with their masks.

[26] This generalization has been explored by a number of scholars in recent years, most interestingly with respect to Rabelais by François Rigolot in the conclusion to his Les langages de Rabelais (Geneva, 1972), 173–75, as well as in his Le texte de la Renaissance, and by Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979). Rigolot, Langages, 175, points out that this problematic was sketched in different form long ago by Jean Plattard in the introduction to his L'oeuvre de Rabelais (Paris, 1910) as a conflict between "artistic form" and "thought." Rigolot calls it "une perspective à la fois agonistique et encorniastique." I am suggesting here more numerous and more radical dissonances in Rabelais's text than these dichotomies define. Some of the most striking analyses of the Renaissance text as a set of dissonant, mutually filtering perspectives have been carried out with respect to Spanish works of fiction such as the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, and of course Cervantes's Don Quixote .