8—
Communalism
In the sixteenth century most people's lives were socially articulated; their membership and participation in the communities into which they were born determined most of what they did. At the same time these communities themselves were loosening, enlarging, and subdividing as a result of commercial enterprise, political centralization, military expansion, religious debate, and a dozen other European developments following upon the socially and biologically more difficult fourteenth and fifteenth century. If "Renaissance individualism" has seemed an important theme since its historicization by Burckhardt and Michelet, this is due perhaps more to its burgeoning importance in these authors' nineteenth-century environment than it is to the typicalness of Leonardo da Vinci, Ambroise Paré, or Martin Luther. It is less, in any case, the actual behavior of people than their thoughts, feelings, and aspirations that become themes in Rabelais's fiction.
To quantify the relative power of communalism or individualism to guide people's ideas and desires in Rabelais's time is impossible. We know that individualism in this sense is dominant in the twentieth century, that communalism was similarly dominant in the tenth century, and that the sixteenth century offered persons reasons to believe in either. But if there were many reasons to believe in individualism, there were fewer means to live so. People's homes — rural, urban, or royal — grouped family, servants, relatives, and often friends for long periods; in the towns the home also housed the master artisan's workmen. Small nuclear families of three or four persons living in separate homes were rarely the norm and scarcely the reality. Unmarried persons did not live alone unless they were old and widowed. Courts, ecclesiastical or secular, and convents for monks or nuns were, like the workshops in the towns, places where groups of people lived together, sharing the whole range of daily life rather than retreating to the privacy and isolation of "residential communities" at the end of the workday.
The relation among different kinds of communities was loose or tight, depending on changeable circumstances. Everyone belonged to many interacting groups — religious, occupational, political, familial. Each membership involved some shared patterns of living together, not merely attendance at an occasional meeting. Religious lay brother-hoods passed days and weeks together in group prayer, festive meals, charitable practices. Town citizenship carried similar obligations of service, with none of the mechanizing facilities that render modern political and administrative life impersonal and routine. Above all, the scale of communities was small. Fewer than a dozen cities in all Europe, including Balkan Turkey, possessed more than one hundred thousand people. The primary tie in a technologically primitive age was neighborhood; the primary social sense in a politically decentralized age was mutual dependency.
This is the kind of society represented in Rabelais's books, an unsettled society full of monarchic, entrepreneurial, rural, religious thrusts toward greater power and centralized control, thrusts that are ever and again swallowed up in a sea of localized communities. This society is neither the rigidly articulated one of local feudal-manorial dominance, which made the social typologies of allegory feasible and insightful, nor the anticommunal one of later days that requires literary entry into the details of individualized choice. But it is one in which enough rips and tears have opened in the network of local communities, and enough grand opportunities for individual talent have emerged due to the expansion of European society generally, so that an illusion of fully individualized choice could arise and the ideal could be fabricated of a life lived purely for the sake of the self's fulfillment.
Enter the picaresque hero, enter the humanist. The rogue fives in society's interstices, pursuing his own profit like the military mercenary Jack Wilton, for example, Thomas Nashe's first-person hero in The Unfortunate Traveler:
About that time that the terror of the world and fever quartan of the French, Henry the Eighth (the only true subject of chronicles) advanced his standard against the two hundred and fifty towers of Turney and Turwin [the campaign against Tournai and Terouanne, 1513] and had the Emperor and all the nobility of Flanders, Holland, and Brabant as mercenary attendants on his full-sailed fortune, I, Jack Wilton, a gentleman at least, was . . . [there intervenes more cheerful bombast, which finally winds down to] winnowing my wits to live merrily, and by my troth so I did. The Prince could but command men to spend their blood in his
service; I could make them spend all the money they had for my pleasure.[1]
The humanist was no more capable than the roguish vagabond of establishing a stable foundation for his grand dreams in a century when copyrights, royalties, and professional posts in the humanities scarcely existed. The international community of scholars clogged sixteenth-century printing presses with their self-seeking letters, always written with an eye to publication, protesting admiration for the addressee and his friends and disdain and disgust for nearly everyone else. Perhaps even Rabelais's letter to Guillaume Budé in 1521, the first of his extant works, only deviates from the genre because he is so anxious about his own obscurity that he scarcely dares backbite.[2]
Panurge represents the Rabelaisian concept of deviant freedom; Epistemon is an incarnation of the humanist ideal. These men are not individualists, and perhaps they do not even dream of being so. They are Pantagruelians, members of a young men's confraternity of joyous travelers who share allegiance to and the bounty of a grand feudal prince. Pantagruel, who is drawn as the most self-sufficient, both physically and mentally, is the most communally minded of the group, never failing in his feudal, filial, or religious obligations. He is also a humanist and a rogue, boon companion of Panurge and given to expressing himself exaggeratedly, gigantically, in the learned and pedantic rhetoric by which humanists distinguished themselves. Pantagruel shares the life of his fellows even while presiding over it. He is communal in ethos.
There is only one practicing individualist in Rabelais's books: Quaresmeprenant, who hunts at the bottom of the sea, bathes above the steeples, and hangs around the streets, alone. Quaresmeprenant's monstrosity is in the largest sense his lack of capacity for community. Throttled perpetually by his simultaneously Carnivalesque and Lenten conscience, he seems to be forced to live alone, incapable of sharing any desire with others for very long. But Quaresmeprenant is only half-human. It is too much to say that Rabelais attributes an ethic of individuality to him. All we learn about him in this respect are his individualistic habits; relevant to our theme here is the author's apparent
[1] Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1972), 254–55.
[2] L, 959–61.
association of individualistic behavior with monstrosity. Quaresmeprenant's idiosyncrasy is larger than life, worse than anything actual, perhaps because actuality, still so communal, made a self-isolating mania — something which for twentieth-century persons is almost the norm — seem possible to represent only in fantasy. Quaresmeprenant is a mental projection, an imagination of mind-torn self-absorption that balloons in the psyche to create a somatic freak, a child of Anti-Nature like those critics who led the author to brood with mythifying intensity on the excesses of censure.
In Rabelais the representation of action is usually undertaken collectively and shared communally. Heroes may recount adventures undertaken individually elsewhere — Panurge most conspicuously — but they do so for the benefit of sharing the account with Pantagruelians and with Pantagruelist readers.[3] The politics of communication Within the narrative — who narrates to whom, for what purpose? — are constructed so as to urge a certain kind of communication beyond the narrative, between the text and its readers. Tracing the devices by which one kind of communication urges the other reveals the communal ethos.
The novel between the seventeenth and the early twentieth century depended upon representing highly individualized narrators. The novel's construction was based either on presenting everything from the point of view of a character involved in the action, the first-person narrator, or on presenting everything from the point of view of an omniscient observer capable of entering into each character in turn, such that overall unity emerged from the assembly of individual views. After and before the period of the classic novel, however, the narrator's voice is split. There are discontinuities between one or several narrators' comments, and the actions to which they refer are not resolved by an omniscient voice.[4] But the reasons for splitting narrators and disrupting the unity of signification are not the same in the twentieth century as they were in the sixteenth. Discordant narrator-voices in Joyce's Ulysses
[3] I use "Pantagruelian" to designate Pantagruel and his fictional companions. "Pantagruelist," as used by Alcofribas and Dr. Rabelais, refers to those in all ages, past and future, real and fictional, who profess Pantagruelism: Horace, the "ancient Pantagruelist"; Dr. Rabelais; the Pantagruelians — and you too, "gouty ones."
[4] Of course there were and are exceptions to this schema. In the very heyday of the classic novel, for example, Laurence Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy and Denis Diderot wrote Jacques le fataliste .
correspond to split subjectivity, to the discovery of gaps and disjunctions within as well as between private, individualized psyches. The split narrator in Rabelais's books is another matter. Here narrative voices interact with each other. They repeat, overlap, and participate in each other's mentality.
Rabelais's narrator Alcofribas enters into the action; he is part of the Pantegruelian troop on shipboard. The personage standing on the margin of this narrative report, the "author Master François Rabelais" who writes the prologue to the Fourth Book, is revealed by the character of his discourse to be an alter ego to Alcofribas, especially for those readers who have read the prologues to Gargantua and Pantagruel "by the author" who is not François Rabelais but "Master Alcofribas" as stated on the title pages to these earlier volumes. In the case of the Fourth Book, still another figure writes for all to read: "Dr. François Rabelais," the signer of a letter of dedication to the "Most Illustrious Prince and Most Reverend Lord Odet, Cardinal of Châtillon." This narrator dons the mask of a leisured doctor who knows many "great persons" like Odet and writes both for his own amusement and, like Alcofribas, in order to give some "relief " to the "sick and unhappy."[5] Because the title page states that the Fourth Book is written by "Master François Rabelais, doctor in medicine," readers over the cardinal's shoulders would have concluded that Rabelais was a metaphorical and also a real doctor who claimed skill in the arts of both words and medicine.
Perhaps the narrator's presentation of himself as a well-off doctor-writer is less a mask than a costume suitable for a man of middling estate to present himself to a courtier. Most readers would probably have slid easily from title page to dedication letter to prologue, scarcely troubling themselves to differentiate among narrative personae to reflect upon Rabelais's device of using an anagram of his name, Alcofribas, to tell his tales. That is no accident. Merging of the narrators is as encoded as their separation because the context of these narrations in dedication, prologue, and text is the communal framework shared by real author and real readers. That framework establishes identity not through a sense of inimitable selfhood but through calculation of the relations among life's many memberships.
[5] QL, DL, 539, opening paragraph. Alcofribas's parallel words as a writer who cures physical ills are in G, Pr, 28, concluding paragraph, and especially in P, Pr, 190.
Rabelais's many selves, including the selves peopling his imagination, were interconnected with each other and with those of other members of contemporary society: stated thus, I simply affirm the obvious. It is the way a communal consciousness interplays with political tactics and formal subtlety that is interesting. The interplay is most developed in his last publication before death, the Fourth Book of 1552. It develops so far, in fact, that it ironically undermines the communalism.
It took time for Rabelais to arrive at the chastened, curtailed, and sometimes negative visions of community in the Fourth Book . The development is easiest to trace in the paratexts and clearest in reference to two issues that, in Rabelais's usual way, are fictionally represented rather than openly discussed: the issues of author-narrator interplay and of readerly reactions to his tales.
Until 1546, when the Third Book was published, Rabelais avoided coupling his own name with title page, prologue, and text. Perhaps because he received a royal privilege in September 1545, he published his name on the title page in 1546. But he changed the title of the prologue: instead of "Prologue of the Author," as in Gargantua and Pantagruel, it reads: "Prologue of the Third Book." The fiction that prologues have been written by Alcofribas is not belied.[6] The same is true of the incomplete Fourth Book published in 1548: "Rabelais, doctor in medicine" is on the cover, but the prologue is entitled simply "Prologue of the Fourth Book [of] Pantagruel."[7]
From 1532 to 1552, when the final form of the Fourth Book appears, Rabelais labels his works ever more subtly. Why, for example, did he undermine a straightforward claim to authorship on the title page of the Third Book (1546) and incomplete Fourth Book (1548) by not only qualifying himself as "Doctor in medicine" but also as "Calloier of the Hieres Islands"? "Callo-ier" is an adaptation of Greek kalos hieros, handsome (or appropriately looking) priest; kalos hieros was a common Greek Orthodox Christian term for monk. The Hyères Islands, situated off the Mediterranean Coast near Toulon, France, were desolate, rocky places that would have served well for the cenobitic life of many Orthodox monks; a Cistercian monastery was founded there in the twelfth
[6] Cf. P. Plan, Bibliographie, 35 (Pantagruel ) with NRB 130 (Gargantua ) and NRB 174. (Third Book ).
[7] Plan, Bibliographie, 140.
century. By Rabelais's time this group of three islands had also become a refuge for pirates.[8]
Rabelais, whose books celebrate conviviality, seems to identify himself in 1546 and 1548 as a doctor and self-isolating ecclesiastic on a rocky, unsavory isle. Was it simply that he could not resist the approximate phonic reduplication of the word calloier's loi-er in (is)les (H)ier (es)? Obviously not. I have commented on the fury with which Rabelais attacked his censors in the prologue to the incomplete Fourth Book .[9] At the end of the prologue of the Third Book he already raged in the same manner:
As for those padded big-wig brains, haggling critics, don't bring them up, I beg of you, by the name and by the reverence you bear to the four buttocks that begot you and the life-giving peg that coupled them . . . .
Back off, you mastiffs! Out of my way, out of my sun![10] Cowls, to the devil with you! So you'd come here to buttock around and article my wine before you piss on my barrel? . . . Get packing, cagotz! Off to your sheep, mastiffs! Out of here, caphars,[11] get the devil away! You're still there? I'll give up my share in Papimania if only I can nab you![12] Grr, grrr, grrrrrr. Away, away![13]
The misanthropic anger of this prologue writer is anything but communalist in spirit. The cantankerous, individualistic persona of an island-dwelling monk, full of rocky, rough crotchets like the islands of his supposed origin, is appropriate.[14]
[8] Frank Lestringant, "L'insulaire de Rabelais," 269–71.
[9] See pp. 34–35.
[10] The prologue author, having assimilated himself to Diogenes, refers here to the incident in which the Cynic philosopher, seated in his humble barrel upon the public square, is visited by the world conqueror Alexander. Diogenes tells Alexander, shadowing his barrel, to step aside; he does not yet own the sunshine.
[11] On cagotz and caphars, see ch. 3, n., 41.
[12] In 47–54 of the Fourth Book the Pantagruelians visit Papimania, island kingdom of papal devotees.
[13] TL, Pr, 350–51. NRB, 45, explains the mistaken reading of "Grr," etc., as "Gzz" etc. in TL, Pr, 351.
[14] Lestringant, "L'insulaire de Rabelais," 268, points out that "caloyer" was also a term used in Italian, Dutch, and French navigational atlases to mean rocky island. Rabelais's "calloier" is polysemic, as Lestringant emphasizes. Screech, Rabelais, 298, suggests further, for example, that the use of calloier is meant to designate Rabelais's current ecclesiastical status in 1548 as a priest rather than to refer to his past identity as a monk: the fatherhood of priests, not the brotherhood of monks, is supposed to be emphasized; this seems doubtful.
In Gargantua and Pantagruel author and narrator seem to be the same persons, but this is only an appearance: Alcofribas Nasier is an anagram, a mask for the author who is never mentioned. In the Third Book and incomplete Fourth Book the author Rabelais is explicitly separated from the narrator Alcofribas but implicitly unified with him because the reader is now given the means to decipher the relation between Master François on the new title pages and Master Alcofribas on the title pages of the first two books. But no sooner has the true author's name appeared than it is falsified by a mystifying attribution: Rabelais, the monk from pirate islands near Toulon.
With the subterfuges of the Third Book and incomplete Fourth Book, the dispersion of the narrator has been developed so far that Rabelais the author and Rabelais the doctor, instead of standing dimly at the edge and beyond the books, are folded into its structure as two more of its overlapping images. The dispersion of the narrator semioticizes the participation of the writer in his writing, of the doctor in the writer, and of the monk in both of them. I mean by "semioticize" what was established in chapter 7: Rabelais's words develop their power by combining with each other sometimes in a primarily "symbolic" manner, as mutually conditioning linguistic patterns, sometimes in a primarily ideational manner, as words directing attention to thought patterns, and sometimes in a primarily referential manner, as words referring to persons and states of action in and beyond this fictional universe.
Then in 1552 the complete Fourth Book is published, and the Third Book is reissued with corrections. Rabelais's monkish identity is deleted from the title pages; on both of them he is introduced as simply a "doctor in medicine.[15] Moreover, the prologues are now identified in both the Third Book and the Fourth Book as by the "author"; given the adjacent title pages, they can only be by Rabelais, not Alcofribas. The narrator represented in the text is therefore eliminated from the para-text. But even as narrator and author are more explicitly separated, even as the author's profession is simply stated without fictive adjuncts, the author's personality, as exhibited in the fictional masks and costumes of the paratext's parts, takes on a new complexity: the prologue narrator in the new prologue to the Fourth Book of 1552 seems at first to be a very
[15] Rabelais, Oeuvres, critical edition by A. Lefranc, 5:1, gives the details of the title page in the Third Book in 1552. NRB, 231, reproduces the title page of the Fourth Book in 1552.
proper gentleman, however playful (the Lenten game of "I spy"), but he soon drops this role for the more familiar one of priapic storytelling, only to switch from that to the role of preacher. The dedicatory author is by turns very proud and very humble, very anxious about and very loud in praise of his books.[16] The character of the source of these fictions becomes more convoluted with each publication; Rabelais's para-texts become more elaborate and add new parts.
Paratexts are stitched all around and into texts; they expose the indefiniteness of a text's edges, the literal impossibility of cutting an author's words neatly from their context and exhibiting them as an icon. As I suggested in Part One, paratexts seem to be chiefly interesting at times of swift, disruptive change in the conventions of written communication. At other times they tend, far more than texts, to become standard in form and content. Perhaps because twentieth-century readers are now entering a period of major dislocation in the communication of lettered words, the possibilities inherent in the paratext-text relationship appear more clearly to present-day critics; in the case of Rabelais, as in the case of Montaigne and Cervantes, they appear to have been exploited with virtuosity.[17]
Paratexts are inescapable in printed books for at least four reasons: the print has an edge, it has a beginning, it has parts and subdivisions, large and small, and it has an end. To this physical character of printed books correspond psychological and economic necessities. The printed book maximizes an impersonal tie between the senders and the receivers of its messages; I say "maximizes" because manuscript books of the later Middle Ages already developed this impersonality. As impersonality develops, so does a commercial relation: senders and receivers are less related as client and patron or master and student and more as seller and buyer. The writer must find readers; they are no longer known in advance.
The paratext-as-edge is the first approach to unknown readers; book cover, title page, table of contents, and the colophon at the other end of the book in the early days of printing make this approach. The pub-
[16] These narrative feints are studied in detail in ch. 9.
[17] See on Montaigne and Cervantes, Randa Sabry, "Quand le texte parle de son paratexte," Poétique, no. 69 (February 1987): 85, 94. On Rabelais's narratological play generally, we refer again to François Rigolot's chapter, "Narratologie: Vraisemblance et illusion référentielle," devoted to Gargantua and Pantagruel, in his Le texte de la Renaissance, 137–53.
lisher's influence over an author is great at these points, but both publisher and author realize that it is in their mutual interest to confer and compromise on such elements: neither of them knows certainly how readers will react to their choices, and each knows that the other possesses expertise of which they have need.
The paratext-as-beginning follows upon the book's greeting to its readers: readers are ushered into the text by dedication, preface, epigraphs, frontispiece, introduction. Paratext-as-edge maximizes the seller-buyer tie and is as attractive — even deceptively attractive — as possible. It does not hesitate to exhibit titles and show chapters that may contain far less than they promise. Paratext-as-beginning has other functions that are in part defensive. It is a question not only of acquiring readers but also of insuring understanding of the text that follows. These parts of paratext try to guard against misreading just as much as they try to stimulate sympathy for the writing project. Authors deal here more directly with their public than at any other point: the sender-receiver tie is primary.
The paratext as a set of signals of subdivision in the text does not arise primarily, like the earlier two parts, from concern with the book's readership but from concern with the book's readability. A book is long, ordinarily too long to read at a sitting, and so it has parts that allow for pauses in its enjoyment and understanding. Chapter titles, intertitles, notes, chapter epigraphs, illustrations, graphs, diagrams, and tables point and summarize the arguments and the flow of narration. They give rhythm to the verbal energy, articulating its rise and fall. They bring out hidden connections in a verbal medium that, although necessarily linear in its acquisition by readers, is nonlinear in its understanding. The longer a text is, adding words to words from page to page, the more its contrastive levels appear, evolving in varied directions, and the more its reflexively stitched form comes to readerly consciousness. Paratextual signals of subdivision orient readers toward these realizations.
Paratextual forms are finally used to make an end of the book, to mark its conclusion, summarize it, and in some cases reevaluate it. The end of a book stimulates the critical function in authors as it does in readers; this is all there is: What was said? What should have been said? What was not said but nevertheless implied? The paratext-as-end tries to guard against the menaces of metatexts and, often enough, to offer its own in postfaces, endnotes, and appendixes. It tries to facilitate reuse of the book with indexes of greater or lesser complexity.
The critics who in the last few years have renewed and broadened our sense of paratexts have stressed the difference between text and paratext as one between stasis and movement, although not always in the same way. On one hand the text is regarded as a solid, unchanging monument, while paratexts are seen as parade wagons that convey the monument from authors to their public; they activate the text and render it performative. On the other hand the text-paratext relation is formulated as the difference between textual attention to polysemic openness and paratextual concern for fixity of sense, such that interpretation of the text is oriented by paratext toward the historical, psychological, and social particulars of the texts production.[18]
These dualist contrasts are illuminating, but they may obscure the ways in which text and paratext function together; they may diminish awareness of books as jointly created by authors, publishers, editors, and readers' responses. Paratext renders the text more supple but also more definite in its contextual assumptions. The text reveals both the meaning and the limits of the overly measured and overly grandiose claims held out by paratext. Text and paratext belie each other. Their disjunction is not only inevitable but also enjoyable. Doesn't everybody already know this game anyway? — I see you! Now you must join me in a toast to the monk.
Rabelais's repeated revisions and reeditions of his works, together with his frequent changes of publishers (he was sued by one of them in early 1546)[19] offer rich materials for a study of the novels' paratext-as-edge. Complete study of it or other aspects of paratext is not my purpose here.[20] The different dimensions of the text-paratext relation have been indicated primarily in order to focus more clearly on parts of Rabelais's paratext-as-beginning. I want now to clarify the implications of the addition of a dedicatory letter to the Fourth Book beyond its obvious political function. Adding this letter caused the author not only to re-
[18] These alternatives are considered in Rigolot, "Prolégomenes." See, e.g., 11–13, his use of the text/discourse distinction to throw fight on the difference between text and paratext as fixity and flow, versus 13–14., his reference to a Kristevan distinction between sign and symbol, the former (primary in the text) allowing for verbal variability and the latter (primary in the paratext) "oriented to a precise sense."
[19] See NRB, 172, concerning the lawsuit brought by Chrétien Wechel. Original documents stating the cause of the lawsuit have not been located.
[20] Much fuller study of paratextual and textual responses in the form of revisions and reeditions of a Renaissance French author's works is included in my The Works of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (The Hague, 1967).
vise the function and narrative personae depicted in the prologue to that book but also to tinker with the prologue and title page to the Third Book, which was reissued at the same time (1552).
Some of the most difficult problems in Rabelaisian interpretation are thereby broached. Analysis of the relation between dedicatory letter and prologue clarifies a general shift in narrative voice, noticeable in the Third Book and obvious in the Fourth Book . This shift specifies Rabelais's communalist assumptions in writing and why he felt they were in jeopardy in the 1540s, which in turn will allow us to guess why Rabelais impersonated himself as an angry ecclesiastic from the Hyèes Islands and why he at the same time gave a new nuance to Pantagruelist philosophy.
The shift in narrative voice must have slowly matured during the long silence of this writer between the publication of Gargantua and Pantagruel in 1532–1535 and that of the Third Book and Fourth Book in 1546–1552. Linguistic virtuosity deserts the previously dominant narrator (Alcofribas) to place itself after the silent period in a more diversified way among the Pantagruelian actors and those they encounter. In the Third Book the eloquent anxiety of Panurge and sententious wisdom of Pantagruel orient while doing little to integrate this scattering. In the Fourth Book rhetorical dominance is a three-way and four-way tussle among Pantagruel, Xenomanes, Alcofribas, and the occupants of the islands.[21] Especially in the Fourth Book the fusion of the narrative functions with that of acting in the narrative-Alcofribas is present on shipboard; Xenomanes offers advice about the ship's route-reinforces the representation of writing as a translation of collective, oral contexts. Meaning emerges from an ongoing, open-ended, social process.
[21] See Rouben Cholakian's analysis of these shifts and tussles, established by calculating who tells the stories in each of the four books in his The Moi in the Middle Distance: A Study of the Narrative Voice in Rabelais (Madrid, 1982). To some extent it is falsifying to give Xenomanes the same narrator status as Pantagruel, Alcofribas, or the inhabitants of the islands. As a guide to the Land of the Lanterns who has already traveled this route, his information is given special status, somewhat similar to that of the omniscient narrator in the classical novel. What he says is not subject to the seesaw of comic-serious allegory that puffs up and deflates the words of Pantagruel, Friar John, Panurge, and Alcofribas. But even Xenomanes is no exception to narrator dispersion and narratee confusion; he is not hierarchically set off to occupy an author-reader box of communication. Xenomanes, like his shipboard companions and unlike the putative author and readers, is presented as experiencing these fictive islands as real.
From this point in chapters 8 and 9 readers will be asked to cope with some movement back and forth among four topics that are interwoven in order to show how, alongside the continuing representation of collectively created verbal meanings, a narrative counterflow emerges in Rabelais's later texts that changes the character of the author's communalism. The four topics are: the authorial strategies shared by all four books published by Rabelais; Rabelais's defenses against misinterpretation in his first two books; Rabelais's development of new defenses in 1546 and afterward; and finally, the formalization of these new defenses into altered author-reader relations in the Fourth Book of 1552.
First, then, a further word about authorial strategies in all four books. The ragged, intercepting, overlapping form of author-narrator-reader representations was a useful strategy at a time when storms of religious war were ominously gathering, for who could say which narrative voice designates the opinion of Rabelais the person? But the assumption that people's normal mode of existence is that of participants in a number of cross-cutting communities also played a role in Rabelais's authorial strategy. The shifts among narrators confirm the idea that authorial meaning should be seen as scattered over the whole field of actors and actions in a book rather than be understood as concentrated in a hero. This is not to say that there are no hillocks and hollows in the field but only to emphasize that such varied landscape takes its shape from the whole. To suppose that Alcofribas or Pantagruel or any one else speaks consistently for the author, so that his voice runs like a mole's burrow of half-hidden meaning through the whole field, is to mistake parts and whole and to ignore Rabelais's communalist assumptions about communication. One should look not for what Rabelais intends to say but for the variation in the groups and members of groups to which he lends his voice.
The place of the narrator is not yet, like the place of the king in Velasquez's painting Las Meninas, a space beyond the reach of the communities filling Rabelais's tale. It is not yet a space beyond the chess-boardlike partitioning of social orders each from each, the generalized, overspreading, almost invisibly located space of the sovereign who designates the places of his subjects. In the sovereign-centered "classical episteme" both senders and receivers of messages stand outside the action and the actors in it; each element inside the narrative frame has its appointed, separate space, as the author-king urges his partners in
power, the readers, to see.[22] The postclassical novel of the twentieth century undoes this narrative clarity in the name of a centerless text representing unorderable reality. Senders and receivers of such dissipating messages are even more separate in the postclassical novel than in the model it assaults. The Rabelaisian text-paratext, on the other hand, represents narration as a meeting ground rather than as a means of assessing the separation of author, actors, and audience.
In Rabelais's prologues this sense of meeting and mixture of narrative fields and personae is not merely represented; it is thrust upon the reader. The scenes that are sketched and the actors in them are manipulated in such a way as to demand that readers understand the novels only in such mixed and flexible ways. If readers therefore begin Rabelais's prologues expecting to be ushered into the text in the manner of an introduction or preface, they are soon baffled. The prologues present conflicting images of the author then or subsequently. Their conflict suggests that they must be read for what they imply as well as for what they say.
The locus classicus of this suggested double reading is the prologue to Gargantua . Referring to Alcibiades's praise of Socrates as a Silenus box in Plato's Symposium, Master Alcofribas declares that his books are like these ancient Greek playthings, comically ugly on the outside but packed inside with pharmaceutical rarities and other precious things. Hence while you the readers will find "in a literal sense" some joyous matters here, you must not remain at this level but "interpret in a higher sense what you perhaps thought was said in gaiety of heart." These words urge readers to seek high meaning beneath a low and negligible surface. But the following paragraphs seem to turn against this impulse:
Do you faithfully believe that Homer, when he was writing the Iliad and Odyssey, thought about the allegories which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, and Phornutus plugged into him [lesquelles de luy ont calfreté; literally, which have stopped up the chinks in, or caulked, him] . . . ? If you think so, you do not come within hand or foot of my opinion, which is that those things were as little dreamed of by Homer as the Gospel sacraments were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses .[23]
[22] The reference is to Michel Foucault's analysis of Velasquez's painting in The Order of Things, ch. 1, and to his definition of the classical episteme in chs. 3–6.
[23] G, Pr, 25–27.
The seeming contradiction of these words to Alcofribas's allusion to Silenus boxes with their precious inner meanings has been dispelled by Edwin Duval. The prologue to Gargantua does not concern the choice of allegorical over literal readings or the inverse. It is about both readerly and authorial perceptions of the text: one may find in my books, as others have found in Homer, says Alcofribas, meanings that I never dreamed of as I wrote. But that does not imply that the meanings are not there. I wrote while eating and drinking and "that is the proper time to write about these high matters and profound sciences, as Homer, paragon of all philologists, knew well how to do . . . according to Horace."[24]
Neither the relative value of allegorical and literal reading nor of learned versus naive interpretation but the inevitability of false consciousness is Alcofribas's theme. Homer never imagined the things Plutarch saw in the Iliad and the Odyssey because Homer's context was different from Plutarch's. Both Plutarch's and Homer's other commentators saw some meanings that were true and others that were false to Homer's words. How can one know which are which? How should one read? In the same manner as one should write, while eating and drinking. Drinking is emphasized in all the prologues as the manner in which and indeed by means of which author and readers may best meet. "Most illustrious boozers," the prologue to Gargantua begins, and they are also the first words in the prologue to the Third Book; the Fourth Book' s prologue begins by praising last year's vintage and assuring readers that they have in wine a sure remedy for every difficulty.[25]In Vinoveritas: drinking inspires not simply good companionship but true understanding. Drinking inspires that loosened framework of semiotic suggestiveness and empathetic receptivity which discovers matters not consciously known. It leads readers, as it has led writers, to intuit matters unconsciously written about by authors.
These ideas are implicit in the very choice of Alcofribas's exemplum.
[24] G, Pr, 27. Edwin Duval, "Interpretation and the 'doctrine plus Absconce' of Rabelais' Prologue to Gargantua," Etudes rabelaisiennes 18 (1985): 1–17, shows that in the case of this prologue, much as in the case of the misreading of the passages concerning Quaresmeprenant, simple mistranslations have led scholars to false conclusions and illusory controversy.
[25] G, Pr, 25; TL, Pr, 341; note that the first words appearing here, bonnes gens, displacing beuveurs très illustres, were added in 1552, for reasons to be discussed later.
Alcibiades's comparison of Socrates to a Silenus box occurs in Plato's Symposium, which is the representation of a banquet. Alcibiades makes his comment in this convivial setting, being very drunk. Alcrofribas makes his reference to Plato the philosopher's representation of drunken truth in a comic prologue that offers serious arguments in a comic, convivial manner parallel to Plato. Most humanist readers would have been aware of this replication at a subtextual level of Alcofribas's seemingly outrageous assertions. To humanist readers these assertions would scarcely have been surprising for other reasons, too.
In distinguishing between literal and allegorical readings, humanists insisted that a text should first be read for its literal sense, which meant establishing the historical setting of the words, the text's linguistic and social context.[26] In this sense Alcofribas refers to Homer as the paragon of philologists. The word philologist in Rabelais's day meant not a scholar equipped with the complex and precise methodologies elaborated by linguists in the nineteenth century but more simply and generally a lover of words.[27] Homer probably seemed to Rabelais a philologist because he indulged in words as much as he was said to indulge
[26] QL, Pr, 545. In their insistence on the primacy of the literal-historical sense, humanists polemicized against theological interpretation, which prescribed a fourfold approach to words in which the anagogical, mystical sense of words, for example, was to be given equal weight with the literal.
[27] In Rabelais's day philology, in spite of the new critical instruments developed by humanists like Lorenzo Valla and Guillaume Budé, was still generally interpreted, in accordance with its etymology, as the learned orator's and writer's love of language, as the pursuit and practice of eloquent, learned discourse. Budé, the very person from whom Rabelais borrows the list of Homer's commentators (as Duval points out, "Interpretation," 7, n. 10), was responsible for popularizing the term among French scholars (De Philologia, 1532), and he did so in this broad, embracing sense. Of course, even if Budé, like Rabelais, did not distinguish clearly between philology as a technique for restoring texts and philology as a rhetorical ideal, a vision of perfect reading, writing, and discourse, this does not mean that the former did not exist at all. On this point see Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970), 19–25, 55–65: the reasons for the emergence of philology as a critical science, separate from or superior to its meaning as a rhetorical ideal, have to do with the growth of historical mindedness (1400–1600) and with the changing materials, above all legal, to which humanist modes of textual restoration were applied. Emergence had begun, but clear separation of scientific from rhetorical ends for philology lay in the future, beyond Rabelais's times. Thus, Boulenger, G, Pr, 27, n. 15, and other commentators on this prologue passage explain philology anachronistically, which is part of the cause of persistent misinterpretation.
in wine; it was certainly not because he studied words technically. Taking words literally and letting them flow, Homer gave them, drinking, other meanings high and low without necessarily knowing what he did.[28]
Rabelais's alter ego Alcofribas asserts, then, that readers need inspiration in order to read well, and that the best, most word-loving writers possess that virtue. Inspiration guides writers' and readers' thoughts beyond their conscious knowing. But although such inspiration accompanies eating and drinking according to Alcofribas, it is not derived from them but instead comes from on high, infers Edwin Duval. The deeper meaning of Homer's vinous verbal richness is that the poet is a vessel of divine wisdom. Duval admits that belief in a divine source of poetic power is only implicit in Alcofribas's argument; the inference seems warranted, he believes, because it is nearly as commonplace an idea among humanists as their emphasis on the priority of literal meaning. The inference is not warranted. The inspiration that comes from food and drink transforms writers not into "inspired . . . vates " but into boon companions.[29]
Rabelais was a doctor; his idea of a writer's inspiration was physiological no less than philosophical. He speaks of it with the voice of Dr. Rabelais in a most telling place, at the end of the dedicatory letter to Odet de Châtillon prefacing the Fourth Book: "For you with your most honorable exhortation have given me both courage and inventiveness, and without you my heart would have failed me and the fountain of my animal spirits would have remained dry." Heart and courage (French coeur, courage ), animal spirits and inventiveness: the psychophysiology is Galen's and is explained in two passages in the Third Book, once by Panurge and once by Pantagruel. Food and drink, transformed into blood in the stomach and liver, flow to the heart. The heart is the "fountain" of animal spirits because its left ventricle so "subtilizes"
[28] The allusion of Alcofribas to Horace for this concept of Homer is from Horace, Epistles, Book 1, epistle 19, vv. 1–6: "Learned Maecenas, no lyric poems live long or please many people . . . which are written by drinkers of water . . . . By lavishing praises on wine, Homer shows that he was a drinker." See Duval, "Interpretation," 2, on the humanists' literal sense, and 9, n. 14, on the common reference to divine inspiration as the source of poetic wisdom.
[29] Duval, "Interpretation" 9–10. I am not asserting that Rabelais nowhere expresses belief in a divine source of poetic power, explicitly or implicitly. I am only saying that such belief plays no role in the interpretative system proposed in the prologue to Gargantua .
the blood "that it is called spiritual"; then the heart sends it through the arteries. Animal spirits "spring up" in this arterial blood "refined to a pure state in that admirable network [retz admirable] which lies beneath the ventricles of the brain" so that we "imagine, speak, judge, resolve, deliberate, reason, and remember."[30] Pantagruel adds in his description of the process, as one would expect him to do, that fasting is not a good thing for the animal spirits, for hunger will "pull down the roaming spirit, making it neglect its nourisher and natural host, the body."[31] The process is circular, from matter to mind and back again; it is naturalistic, involving no supernatural intervention. The stimulus to which Rabelais refers as so essential in renewing his animal spirits, the exhortations of Cardinal Odet, has a social character like Alcofribas's plea at the conclusion to the prologue of Gargantua:
To be called and reputed a good fellow and good companion is for me nothing but honor and glory, and with such a name I am welcome in all good companies of Pantagruelists . . . . Interpret therefore all my words and deeds in the most perfect way; hold in reverence the cheese-like brain which feeds you with these pretty, puffy-bowel trifle[32] and, as far as you can, keep me always merry.
Writing feeds fellowship; words are inseparable from deeds; sociability is the soul of honor. The "most perfect, interpretive effort no less than the body's most material profit flows from and back into convivial merriment:
Now be cheerful, my dears, and gaily read the rest for your body's ease and intestine's profit. But listen, you donkey-dongs (may an ulcer lame you!), remember to pledge me likewise and I'll drink to you in just a minute.[33]
Is this the appeal to the benevolent nature of Christian humanist readers of which Duval speaks? "The prologue to Gargantua is quite simply
[30] TL, 4, 367–68, and TL, 13, 395.
[31] TL, 13, 396.
[32] Belles billes vezées: Lefranc's edition of Rabelais, Oeuvres, vol. 1, 17, n. 121, says that beillevezée means an empty bowel in Poitevin dialect but does not document or date the observation. Vezé is translated by Nicot and Raconnet, Thresor (1621), 659, as "Ventrosus" that is, wind-filled, puffed-up, pot-bellied. Billes vezées is translated by Cotgrave, Dictionarie (1611; no pagination; see under billes ) as trifles or trash, presumably considering "Windy bowels" to be analogous to air-filled fools' bladders.
[33] G, Pr, 28. Part of the uncouth, rustic air for which Rabelais strove in this passage (he used Gascon and Poitevin dialectical forms) is lost in my translation.
a captatio benevolentiae in the strictest sense of the term. It represents an effort on the part of the author to disarm the reader by overcoming his initial skepticism, to make him want to read on by winning his confidence in the value of the book . . . . Christian benevolence of the kind defined at the end of the prologue [sic ] is in fact a crucial element of the 'doctrine plus absconce' [the 'more recondite teaching' Alcofribas suggests lies 'inside' the lighthearted exterior of his words] . . . promised in the prologue . . . . The 'doctrine absconce.' in other words, is nothing more nor less than the moral virtue required to seek it."[34]
Every critic selects some words of the text at the expense of others in order to give point and power to his or her ideas. The key words for Duval at the "end" of the prologue are "Interpret . . . my words and deeds in the most perfect way" (Interpretez . . . mes faictz et mes dictz en la perfectissime partie ). These words, he suggests, refer to the "special kind of benevolence" in interpreting others' behavior which is urged upon Christians by Rabelais's contemporaries Desiderius Erasmus and Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples.[35] I have quoted the rest of the sentence after the semicolon that follows "most perfect way," a remainder that refers once more to eating. The eating is not just anything: it refers to tripe — let me be outrageous and say sausage-tripe, the tripe proper to Carnival.
Conviviality is animality is spirituality for Rabelais. The three are blended, not elevated by their equally divine sanction. "God never gave us Lent but certainly the good things we will enjoy together," he wrote to his friend.[36] Duval: "The truly unique importance of the prologue to Gargantua, then, is the way in which it transposes the entire issue of 'interpretation' from a literary to a strictly moral plane, from a question of exegesis to a question of caritas ." Rabelais: "But listen you donkey-dongs . . . I'll drink to you in just a minute." The last words of this prologue are not Christian and moral but Dionysian and phallic.[37]
Criticism concerned with the manner in which readers are related to the text by authorial strategy has been in vogue for several decades.
[34] Duval, "Interpretation," 12 (for the first two sentences), 17 (remainder of quote).
[35] Ibid., 15.
[36] See the quotation from Rabelais's letter of 1542 in ch. 5, n. 22.
[37] Duval, "Interpretation," 17. Gérard Defaux's "D'un problème l'autre: herméneutique de l"altior sensus' et 'captatio lectoris' dans le Prologue de 'Gargantua,'" Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 85 (1985): 195–216, follows Duval's essential syntactic distinctions and concludes, similarly to my suggestion here, that for Rabelais a text's meaning includes not only what the author wished to say but also what he said without wishing it explicitly (214.). As for Defaux's ideas of the implications of this point of view for Rabelais's text generally, we differ on many issues, as readers of his sharply polemic article may judge.
Rouben Cholakian's book on the narrative voice in Rabelais, Dorothy Coleman's chapter on Rabelais as an "Olympian author," and Rigolot's chapter on "narratology" in Rabelais deal with many of the same materials and problems discussed here. But these critics understand Rabelais's procedures within the individualizing terms of a generically designated "implied reader" or "narratee."[38] As suggested in a variety of ways here, neither narratee nor narrator is generically designated by Rabelais. The readers envisaged by the text shift their identity in such a manner as to stimulate recognition that they belong to varying groups whose differences — at least in the first two Pantagruelian books — count for less than their common sociability.
In the last as in the first books, Rabelais's implied readers crowd around the text like the grotesque group pictured on the 1547 title page of Gargantua, readers whom one might suppose, on the basis of addresses made at various points in the text, to be merchants, artisans, servants, nobles, officers of the king, bespectacled scholars, and mere passersby (Fig. 1). Nothing in the text or in the text's sixteenth-century context forces us to think that Rabelais's readers remained the same from one chapter to the next or that Rabelais thought they did. The oral overtones of parts of the discourse, the extraordinary shifts of mood between "high" humanism and "low" scatology, and the episodic patterning of plot, would rather seem to imply an in-and-out participation like that of people on the edges of a crowd watching an entertainer.
[38] Cholakian's The Moi in the Middle Distance (Madrid, 1982), extending the work of Floyd Gray and Abraham Keller on storytelling in the novels, is especially revealing in showing how often and in how many varied ways the characters in the novel take over narrator functions. He is not directly concerned, however, with what Rigolot calls the varying designation of the "narratee" (i.e., narrataire, cf. Rigolot, Le texte de la Renaissance, 140). There is little difference between Rigolot's narrataire, Wolfgang Iser's "implied reader" (The Implied Reader ) and Dorothy Coleman's "envisaged reader" (Rabelais, a Critical Study in Prose Fiction [Cambridge, 1971], 46). On the vogue of reader-oriented criticism and its several varieties, see the helpful anthology and introductory essay by Susan R. Suleiman in Reader in the Text, ed. Suleiman and Crosman.
Rigolot, Cholakian, and Coleman analyze Rabelais's procedures in terms appropriate for the individualized and privatized world of the classic novel developed in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century. Many authors even before the seventeenth century, of course, wrote in terms that individualized and at the same time gave generic qualities to implied readers. But Rabelais was not one of them. He moved rather in the direction of merging readers into a group that included the author and described readers' collective interest and common enjoyment. The invention of Alcofribas is Rabelais's chief narratological device here, Alcofribas the narrator who is also one of the Pantagruelian actors, a faithful servant of Pantagruel, and yet anagrammatically none other than Rabelais the real author.[39]
The attitudes attributed to Rabelais's author-narrators, Dr. Rabelais as well as Alcofribas, are participatory and political rather than Olympian and manipulative. Thus the examples of the "trick[s] of the Olympian author," which Coleman gathers from the Fourth Book, for example, "elevating us to the right hand of the god who is controlling the scene," seem quite to the contrary to emphasize the inseparability of narrator from the narrated and to encourage the participation of narratees in the fictive fun.
Coleman cites the second chapter's description of the mythical "tar-and" that Pantagruel purchases on the island of Medamothi as an example of this Olympian movement: "The nous [we] device is a witness to all the things happening on board ship; it is able to observe details which any of the company can see and also to comment on them from a superior perspective."[40] Here is the passage in question:
[Pantagruel] also commissioned the purchase of . . . a tarand which a Scythian sold to him . . . . A tarand is an animal the size of a young bull . . . . It changes color according to the variety of the places where it grazes and lives . . . . Indeed I have seen it change color . . . . What we found especially marvellous about that tarand was that not only its face and skin but even its hair took the color of its surroundings.[41]
The text moves from description of the exotic animal to the intrusion of Alcofribas the narrator into the text to give ironic realism by means
[39] Gérard Defaux, "Rabelais et son masque comique: Sophista loquitur," Etudes rabelaisiennes II (1974), 89–135, studies Alcofribas's narratological significance in Gargantua, emphasizing the sophistic rhetorical model on which Rabelais drew.
[40] Coleman, Rabelais, 71.
[41] QL, 2, 566–67.
of his eyewitness testimony. Then the theme shifts from "I" to "we," from Alcofribas to the group of which he is a member. Far from elevating readers above the scene, this move plunges them into it by multiplying the ironic realism: not to believe what is said about the tarand would mean rejecting the veracity of not only the narrator but also those who, by the device of Alcofribas's membership in the group of narrative actors, have become coguarantors of the narrative's reality. The passage proceeds to exploit this condition by next describing the changing colors of the tarand as he was led from Panurge to Pantagruel to the ship's captain.
The point emphasized here is not how this comic verification of incident affects the truth value of the narrative but how it makes truth depend on group witnessing and participation. The groups that witness and participate are presented by Rabelais in such an interlocking manner that the passage from purely fictive to nearly real persons is almost imperceptible. Alcofribas's move from "I" to "we" in this passage is narrated in the same conversationally sociable style as his address to readers about the noble ancestry of Sausages in the Carnival-Lent episode. Dr. Rabelais's authorial address to well-wishing in the Prologue and even the doctor's dedication letter to Odet de Châtillon are couched in orally derived, publicly oriented terms. What allows this series of moves among actors, narrators, implied authors, and implied readers to slide along so easily?
Ever since the title page of Gargantua (1534–1535) announced a "book full of Pantagruelism," readers of the novels must have asked themselves about the meaning of this name-turned-abstraction. Surely it has something to do with the qualification of Alcofribas on the same title page as an "abstractor of quintessence"; surely, too, it is related to Alcofribas's assertion in that same preface that there are deep meanings within the Silenus box of his writings. At the end of the first chapter of Gargantua, Alcofribas explains that to "pantagruelize" means to drink when it pleases you and to read about the dreadful deeds of Pantagruel.[42] This early definition retains some link with the non-Rabelaisian farcical figure of Pantagruel as a thirst-making devil. But already in an addition to the very end of Pantagruel, which was published in a new edition of that book in 1534 at the time Rabelais finished work on Gargantua, the term "Pantagruelist, is defined not simply as a mode of
[42] G, 1, 31.
reading and drinking but as a way of life.[43] To be "good Pantagruelists" people should "live in peace, joy, and good health, always making good cheer."[44] The most abstracting reference occurs in the prologue to the Third Book . Pantagruelism is a "specific form and individuating property . . . by means of which those who possess it never take in bad part any things whatever which they recognize as springing from a good, frank, loyal heart."[45] In the Fourth Book' s prologue, also, the somewhat briefer reference to Pantagruelism relates an abstract definition to the behavior resulting from possession of this character trait. Dr. Rabelais, the "author," explains that he is, "thanks to a bit of Pantagruelism (that is, you know, a certain gaiety of spirit pickled in the scorn of fortuitous things) well, strong, and ready to drink, if you will."[46] Pantagruelism is Rabelais's name for that virtue that makes conviviality possible. It describes not merely a tolerance of matters beyond personal control but a positive empathetic desire to appreciate others' intentions as more important than their actions.
But why did Rabelais invent this quality? What was it about the developing form of his novels that led him to give it regular prominence at paratextual points of contact between author and reader? To ask the question is almost to answer it: Pantagruelism. identifies an attitude that Rabelais regards as essential in the author-reader relationship. He therefore represents his authorial personae as possessing it, and he represents his chief actors, the Pantagruelians, as bonded together by it.[47] Pantagruelism insures conviviality in advance and at a distance; it reaches beyond the narrative frame to embrace author and readers unknown and unknowable, everyone who manages to accept the unforeseeable circumstances of life gaily and with spirit.
By giving the word "Pantagruel" a substantive form at the paratextual beginnings and ends of his books Rabelais places this element at once inside and on the margins of textuality. Pantagruelism plays over
[43] See introduction, n. 4, on the date of publication of Gargantua in 1534. or 1535.
[44] P, 34, 335.
[45] TL, Pr, 349.
[46] QL, Pr, 545.
[47] Louis Thuasne long ago pointed out that Rabelais had a model for purposely confusing the personae of author, narrator, and actors in Teofilo Folengo's Baldo . But nothing in Folengo's work corresponds to Pantagruelism, a concretized abstraction that deepens and alters this masking play. See Thuasne, Etudes sur Rabelais, reprint, 177ff.
the text as well as being incarnate in Pantagruel. This allows the books' hero to take the voice of the masked author on occasion, just as the author of the prologues does; if the prologue author growls at the "caphars" and "cagots" who beset him and his writing, Pantagruel does too.[48]
Pantagruelism is Rabelais's idea of social wisdom. It derives from two simple assumptions, humanist and communalist. People possess common human reactions that incline them to laugh at many of the same things, regardless of class and cultural differences. These class and cultural differences are related in overlapping and intersecting rather than sharply divisive ways because people are simultaneously members of many correlative and adjacent communities; their sense of connection is thus as easily or more easily summoned than their sense of separateness. Yet this simple, clear basis on which Rabelais stakes his ability to hold the attention of a disparate, unknown readership is belied by the outcry against his books — an outcry which mounts almost as steadily as the sales. Readers there are many, but not all of them laugh, and even fewer, perhaps, sense much communal identity with each other.
There are readers who are positively committed to twisting the author's words, writes Alcofribas in the new conclusion of Pantagruel in 1534: "false cenobites, cagotz, snails, hypocrites, caffars, " they pretend to be absorbed in devout contemplation when in fact they spend all their time reading Pantagrueline books, "not as much for a joyous pastime as for the purpose of wickedly doing someone mischief." Here is the first sketch of the refrain that becomes in the Fourth Book the myth of Anti-Nature. These bad readers do nothing but "article,[49] monarticle, twist their necks, buttock, ballock, and diaboliculate, that is, calumniate." Flee, abhor, and hate such folk "like I do," exclaims Alcofribas, and then he adds the definition of Pantagruelists in the very last phrase of this amended book: "And if you wish to be good Pantagruelists (that is, to live in peace, joy, and good health, always making good cheer), never put your faith in people who watch through peepholes."[50]
[48] Cf. the terminology and the anger in TL, Pr, 351, with the terms Pantagruel uses to denounce Rabelais's enemies in QL, 32, 651.
[49] See the quotation from the end of the prologue to the Third Book, in ch. 8, no. 13, for another use of this word. It means to list as part of a condemnatory or other potentially injurious inventory. Does "monarticle," then, mean "to single out"?
[50] P, 34, 335.
When the attack is mounted against the "haggling critics" who are once again berated as cagotz, caphars, hypocrites, and so on at the conclusion of the prologue to the Third Book, the context is once again that of apprehension about the reception of the novels, and the books are once again called Pantagrueline.[51] But this time the prologue author goes much further in dealing with those who read his books wrongly. Calling his books a kind of wine, he invites "every true boozer, every true gouty fellow," to come and partake freely of as little or as much as they wish. However, he adds that "I have broached my cask only for you gouty freeholders and drinkers of prime vintage" (italics added).[52] Then follow the vituperative references to bad readers that culminate by calling them dogs and in which the narrator imitates — or hears? — their growling.[53]
The hyperbole of the passage insures its oblique, ironic interpretation. The writer Rabelais, beyond his fictional persona, knows that he can do very little about bad reading and biased metatexts. But does this ironic undercutting of the text's violence extend so far as to cause, and intend to cause, doubt about how nefarious Rabelais's detractors really are? Hardly. Even supposing that Rabelais wants readers to think less ill of his enemies than his narrative personae do, his text gives readers
[51] TL, Pr, 348.
[52] TL, Pr, 347–50.
[53] See the discussion and citation of this passage near the beginning of ch. 8. The context is particularly convoluted in the Third Book Prologue. First, one must remember that the prologue is entitled in 1546 the "Prologue of the Third Book' and hence should be considered to be written by Alcofribas, in fine with the two previous prologues. In 1552 the title is changed to "Prologue of the Author" and hence would seem to be attributed to the author mentioned on the title page, who in turn has shifted in 1552 from being Dr. Rabelais, monk of the Hyères Islands, to being plain Dr. Rabelais. The shift is possible because this prologue, unlike Gargantua or Pantagruel or the later Fourth Book, makes no mention of the profession of the prologue narrator. All the reader knows is that he is a Frenchman, a writer, a drinker, and an ironic imitator of Diogenes. As a patriot wishing to do his bit for a nation preparing for war (the context is the recurrent threat of war with Charles V in the 1540s), the prologue narrator declares that he is about to open his "cask" again, as he has already done in two earlier volumes. Thus not simply the composition of Pantagrueline books is accomplished while drinking (Gargantua prologue) but the result of composition is, as stated in the text, a kind of wine: "Envers les guerroyans je voys de nouveau percer mon tonneau et de la traicte . . . leur tirer du creu de nos passétemps épicénaires un gallant tiercin et consécutivement un joyeulx quart de sentences pantagruelicques." (TL, Pr, 347–48.)
no means to do so except that of encouraging a generalized skepticism about anything these personae say.
The critical situation was, in a way, impossible to treat otherwise than in this ambivalent fashion, which on one hand asks for naive trust in all the authorial personae's intentions and on the other develops an ironic stance toward those same personae's affirmations. Rabelais could not in his paratexts openly debate Sorbonne theologians, papal devotees, Calvinist zealots, and assorted moralists; the ideological stakes were too risky and Rabelais's own moral and intellectual sentiments were too complex to make open ideological confrontation anything but a travesty. But Rabelais must bear the consequences of his unwillingness to state in detail how he disagreed with those attacking him. When the authorial personae affect moral and doctrinal purity, when Dr. Rabelais or Alcofribas protests that the sole intention of the stories is to cheer people up, readers are forced to conclude one of two things about the attitude of the real author: either such affirmations are subterfuges, or the real author is very muddleheaded about the implications of what he writes in the text proper. The latter is most unlikely, and so Rabelais's ranting harshness in calling others hypocritical makes it hard to avoid invoking the same adjective about his writerly strategies.
"The slander of certain cannibals, misanthropes and agelastes,"[54] Rabelais declares in the dedicatory letter of 1552 to Cardinal Odet, "was so outrageous and beyond all reason that I lost all patience and decided not to write another iota." They said my books were full of heresies, he continues:
Gay fooling there is in plenty, offensive neither to God nor the King: such is the sole subject and theme of these books. Heresies there are none, unless one were, perversely and against all usage of reason and common language, to interpret [them] in such a way that I would a thousand times rather have died, if it were possible, than to have thought so. It is as though bread meant stone, fish serpent, and egg scorpion.[55]
[54] These three words mean the same thing: men who cannot laugh. See Appendix 3.
[55] QL, DL, 542: "Car l'une des moindres contumélies dont ilz usoient estoit que tels livres tous estoient farciz d'hérésies diverses . . . ; de folastries joyeuses, hors l'offense de Dieu et du Roy, prou: c'est le subject et thème unicque d'iceulx livres; d'hérésies poinct, sinon perversement et contre tout usaige de raison et de languaige commun interprétans ce que, à poine de mille fois mourir, si autant possible estoit, ne vouldrois avoir pensé." An agitated spirit, it seems, coupled with a rhetoric modeled on officious oratory, produces convoluted grammar in this long sentence.
The references in the last sentence are biblical; did Rabelais also want to begin suggesting here the association amplified in the shortly following chapters about fishy, serpentine, eel-like Sausages? Rabelais continues, reversing the easy irony of earlier paratexts in which prologue authors vowed to defend the truth and worth of everything in the Pantagrueline books "up to any point short of [a heretic's] burning."[56]
For I have said openly to you, complaining of these [slanders], that if I did not deem myself a better Christian than they portrayed me, and if in my life, writings, words, or even thoughts I detected a single spark of heresy . . . I would myself, imitating the phoenix, pile up the dry wood and light the fire in order to burn myself in it.[57]
Between 1546, when the Diogenic author of the Third Book' s prologue denied his book's "wine" to slanderous readers, and 1552, when this prefatory letter was written and published, Rabelais abandoned the method of establishing rapport between author and readers whose features we have traced. In the prologue to the incomplete Fourth Book of 1548 and in the prologue and dedicatory letter Of 1552 Rabelais developed the difference between good and bad readers so far that he imperiled the communal-humanist code on which he had based understanding of his writing. Central to that code had been, as Rabelais explained in the prologue to Gargantua, a collective, cumulative sense of words' meaning; neither author nor any particular set of readers was supposed to possess, let alone express, full metatextual truth about the text. But in 1552 Dr. Rabelais does claim to possess his text's meanings; moreover, he claims that he can interpret the words of his slanderers as perfectly as his own, by employing his knowledge of the uses of reason and common language.
[56] P, Pr, 190. The formula is repeated several times in the course of the Third Book and in the prologue to the incomplete Fourth Book of 1545: QL, Pr 1548, 755.
[57] QL, DL, 542.