9—
Mockery

The prologue of 1552 is the first introductory paratext that unambiguously proclaims François Rabelais the author.^[1] The proclamation is reinforced by its association with the dedicatory letter and its details about the author's reaction to his critics. Taken together, the two seem to offer as straightforward a portrait of François Rabelais as he was capable of presenting in a fictional context. As the author changes, so do the readers. For the first time the prologue carries a subtitle or salutation that qualifies the readers to whom Rabelais the author addresses himself: To well-wishing — or benevolent — readers (aux lecteurs bénévoles ). The earlier prologue-writers' invitation to readers of every stripe is abandoned.

To the moral distinction of the subtitle Rabelais adds a greeting that carries social overtones: "worthy people" (gens de bien ), he begins, and several lines afterward he asks after their wives and families and comments on the produce of their vineyards. These are not the same folk as the "illustrious boozers" and "precious poxy fellows" (Gargantua ), the "chivalric and illustrious champions, nobles, and others" (Pantagruel ), and "illustrious boozers" and "precious gouty fellows" (Third Book, Fourth Book of 1548) summoned to the threshold of earlier publications. Cross-cutting indications, ironically heightening and lowering terms of pseudo-camaraderie and social status, are abandoned in favor of a unidimensional address to comfortably situated men of means. In the reissued Third Book of 1552 Rabelais takes care in the prologue to alter his

[1] That is, introductory as opposed to framing paratexts. See the early pages of ch. 8 and ch. 8, n. 17, on the difference between paratext-as-beginning and paratext-as-edge (title pages affirmed Rabelais as author from 1546). I have drawn heavily in what follows here concerning the 1548 prologue and 1552 dedicatory letter and prologue on Jerome Schwartz, "Rhetorical Tensions in the Liminary Texts of Rabelais's Quart Livre," Etudes rabelaisiennes 17 (1983): 21–36. Although my conclusions differ in details, I agree with his general conclusions and methods in arriving at them.

readerly addresses at the same time as he clarifies his authorial persona; he adds the words "Good people" (bonnes gens ) to the beginning, before the salutation to boozers and gouty folk, and he inserts "worthy people (gens de bien ) near the end of the prologue, when he identifies those for whom alone he intends to broach his wine cask of new stories.^[2]

The dedicatory letter indirectly reinforces this impression of an intended shift in the social status of Rabelais's represented readers: the author addresses himself effusively to one of the highest men of worth in the land, and in the course of the letter he vaunts his connection to the very highest:

The late King Francis of eternal memory was informed about these slanders and, having heard and comprehended these my several distinct books  . . .  as read aloud with the voice and pronunciation of this kingdom's most learned and careful [royal] reader  . . .  had found no passage suspect . . . . His son  . . .  King Henry  . . .  also had [heard the public reading], so that he granted to you [Cardinal Odet] for me a privilege and particular protection.^[3]

The causes of such paratextual shifts in 1552 were both short- and long-term. We have discussed the short-term causes in another connection: within months of its publication in 1546 the Third Book was condemned, in spite of its royal privilege, and King Francis died, rendering the political future for evangelical and humanist reform uncertain.^[4] Rabelais reacted with shocked anger. The hasty publication of a portion of the Fourth Book in 1548 with its bitter satire of royal politics and its concluding vituperative misanthropy documents part of his reaction.^[5] In 1550 Rabelais was introduced to Cardinal Odet, and in August a new royal privilege for all Rabelais's works was granted in the presence of

[2] TL, Pr, 341, 350.

[3] QL. DL, 543.

[4] See pp. 35–36. As suggested in this earlier discussion, not only Rabelais's personal fortunes affected his mood during these years, but also in October 1547 the infamous Chambre ardente ("Burning Chamber") of Parlement began its repression of heresy, passing 450 sentences, including 60 for capital punishment, in 1548–1550. A system for carrying out effective persecution for belief was set in place in France, and both there and abroad the power of humanist Catholics and other reforming liberals within church and state hierarchies declined.

[5] Schwartz, "Rhetorical Tensions," 23–25, emphasizes Rabelais's "violence" in the 1548 prologue. See esp. his analysis, 22–23, of the satiric references to royal politics in Rabelais's tale of the magpies and jays.

the cardinal, who had been entrusted by the king with responsibility for book censorship. The conjuncture of Rabelais's publishing fortunes thus veered sharply from nadir to zenith within four years. The tone of the dedicatory letter in 1552 reflects the rebound.

Publication and its protection was one thing; readerly misunderstanding was another. The longer-term cause of the paratextual. changes culminating in 1552 is Rabelais's slowly matured recognition that he could never expect to win over with laughter whole sectors of opinion, represented by the negative metatexts that had persistently attached themselves to his novels. Rabelais by 1552 seems to have recognized the enormity of the enemy; instead of moving to encounter and convert, praise and abuse, welcome and then make fun of one and all, he chooses his ground and reserves his wine. Offering the latter to one and all had done little or nothing to discourage the partial and distinctly unPantagruelist reading of his books. In 1548 the prologue narrator salutes his illustrious drinking companions in the usual way at the outset, but the fictional ambience that he then sketches is unprecedented in the prologues, mixing a law court case with the exchange of ambassadorial gifts between unspecified authorities. The context is that of patently arbitrary judicial and administrative proceedings similar to those satirized in the text proper of the first three books. In 1552 the fictional ambience of the prologue is equally unfamiliar, as we have seen: the semiprivacy of a house well equipped with books and wine and the complacency of familiar, well-off friends who know and share each other's tastes are substituted for the earlier helter-skelter street or tavern context. Is Rabelais then moving toward the world of the classic novel with its individualistic ethos and sharp caesuras between public and private?

A new surface appears in the texts of 1552, a surface sketched in 154.6 and 1548 but brought to more regular form in the full Fourth Book . The subtext, that is, the text's metaphorical prolongations and half-conscious intentions, correspondingly shifts as well. Juxtaposed to both the surface of the text and its implied extensions (its "substance-stuffed marrow" of current philosophical, religious, and social issues)^[6] is a third element, the countertext, which allows more play, more flexibility

[6] In the prologue to Gargantua, 6, Pr, 26–27, Rabelais compares the inner meaning of his Silenus-box text to a bone's marrow, difficult to obtain but infinitely nourishing and delicious, la substantificque mouelle .

in the way text and subtext are related. This is because the central rhetorical device of the countertext is mockery.

Rabelais's old notion of text was set forth explicitly in the prologue to Gargantua; the new notion is not formulated in any particular passage. I do not assert that it was consciously substituted for the earlier system; it is there, I would argue, in the same sense that Rabelais allowed for the existence of unconscious meanings in Homer. Although not a consciously deployed system, it is a consciously employed and repeatedly invoked stratagem in the Fourth Book . It is present here as a regular part of the kind of reading the author solicits from readers; it was present in earlier books only spasmodically. In Gargantua, Pantagruel, and the Third Book irony is met, supported, or overwhelmed by the exuberant faith expressed by the invention of Pantagruelism. In the Fourth Book mockery overtakes any and all affirmations, including those pertaining to Pantagruel and Pantagruelism.

Irony floods the narrative. Curiously enough, the regular adoption of a way of countering the surface of the story and its implications allowed Rabelais to preserve something of his humanist-communalist principles at the very point in his text where he seemed to abandon them. Contrary to the conclusions of some interpreters of the Third Book and the Fourth Book, populist sentiments are not abandoned in these late publications. Folkloric and antiofficial allusions do not disappear. They are stated obliquely; they are also critically and ironically evaluated along with other partitive social stances.^[7]

The idea of a Rabelaisian countertext is proposed and tested in this chapter as a hypothesis. It requires further application both within and beyond the Fourth Book, as well as comparison with other authors, before its usefulness as a way of reading the text can be confirmed. It certainly clarifies some puzzles which interpreters of the Fourth Book have encountered. That has been demonstrated already in this study in dealing with the Sausage War and its outcome. Beneath the surface

[7] Richard Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin (Lincoln, Nebr., 1985), objects to Bakhtin's interpretation because Bakhtin attributes populist views to Rabelais from beginning to end of the novels. Berrong believes the popular elements in Rabelais's writings were progressively abandoned, beginning with Gargantua . Berrong borrows a binary view of culture — learned and popular, the "great tradition" and the "little" — from Robert Redfield, via Peter Burke's Popular Culture of Early Modern Europe, which is too simple a conceptual tool to deal with Rabelais's multiple and shifting cultural proclivities.

representation of Carnivalesque battle and voracious alimentary enjoyment is the mock epic subtext with its national pride in an iron sow once used to defeat the English. But the pride is comically, countertextually undercut by the piggish, massacring manner of the Pantagruelians' victory. The subtext's construction of battle as a realization of fecundity (the soldiers are carried in a succulent animal's "womb") is undermined by the character of the cooks who stick fingers and tongues into nearly everything and drop the rest before getting it to table. The Sausages appropriately adore a pig as their deity, but this propriety is countertextually undone by constructing the deity's form as a biblical idol that secretes mustard; the Sausages' worship rhymes with what was seen by evangelical reformers as a materialistic deformation in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Even more telling examples of the way countertextual techniques cut across and against surface and subtextual. meanings were observed in Rabelais's chapters about Quaresmeprenant. The strategy used toward readers in these chapters starts by encouraging their curiosity and then swerves toward forcing them to admit bewilderment, as Quaresmeprenant becomes not only less like Carnival but also less like Lent. Rabelais slides this personage from Carnival toward Lent and back again, not once but many times, as if intent on assaulting every effort at clear identification.^[8] These moves, I have suggested, do not produce ambiguity but rather stimulate attempts to read the text perspectivally.^[9]

Perspectival readings in the Third Book and the Fourth Book become more and more often ironic readings. Did this signal that the secondary world of the novels had come to seem entirely out of harmony with the primary, pragmatic world, even though Rabelais continued to represent in the paratexts an embodied connection to it through the wheeling

[8] The ineffectiveness of Rabelais's textual tactics is dramatically demonstrated by the tenacity with which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics, ignoring any idea of countertext, sought to maintain text-subtext clarity and consistency through the impossible equation of Quaresmeprenant with Lent, even at a time when actual linguistic usage and Carnival-Lent customs belying the equation were still relatively strong and integral parts of these critics' cultural awareness.

[9] See the conclusions to ch. 5 and to the introduction to Part 3 on oblique and perspectival readings. The examples given in these chapters of the arrangement of text such that readers are directed to hold two meanings in mind when a certain object is invoked (the Sausages as meat and fish, penis and woman, etc.) are examples of how countertextual irony leads readers to consider more flexibly the relation between the text's and the subtext's meanings and train of development.

and dealing of the prologue narrators? At least we can conclude the following: ironic countertexts gave Rabelais's fictional universe somewhat more autonomy from other worlds — social, practical, natural, and supernatural.

It is useful to remember that fiction, like literature generally, had in the sixteenth century still no generally admitted functions or status separate from those of serving to amuse and adorn on one hand and of instructing or offering moral encouragement on the other. The lack of adequate vehicles to develop reasoned and sophisticated metatexts, noted earlier, reflected the more general absence of ideologically sanctioned ways of thinking about cultural endeavor in terms of its own ends. Michel Beaujour suggested that Rabelais's lack of an anthropological theory of culture was due to his inability to find a place for culture which, while not utterly subordinated to the commands of Supernature, would also be more than the reflection of Nature's impulses — any place, that is, other than "the practice of literature as satire." But the problem facing Rabelais was not just that or primarily that; after all, an adequate concept of human culture requires some idea of independence too from the exigencies of society. It seems likely that Rabelais practiced literary satire not primarily to combat the overbearing claims of God and Nature on human existence but because it allowed him to deal effectively with — and finally by means of his countertextual. strategies to wriggle away from — the threats of church and state condemnation.

Rabelais founded his solution not on the alienated autonomy of the writer of fiction but on reformulation of the connection between culture and society.^[10] In the earlier books the communalist ideal was based upon the humanist presumption that everyone possesses a good nature and potential generosity to which convivial appeal can be made: the harmonization of social groups may be possible, at least in leisure time. People may be at least temporarily restored to health from their folly through gaily communicated and exchanged experience. From shared cultural enjoyment positive social effects will flow.^[11] Having experi-

[10] Beaujour's views, which I have found most helpful in specifying my slightly differing ones, are briefly discussed at the end of ch. 3. His idea of Rabelais's rather desperate belief in the power of literary invention is stated with particular eloquence at the conclusion of Le jeu de Rabelais, 174–75.

[11] As suggested in ch. 8, Rabelais's communalism was not a description of actual social relations but rather one of the ideal form of those habits of shared living characteristic of most everyday behavior in his time.

enced the steady enmity of certain critics over twenty years, Rabelais recognized that some people wanted no restoration from their folly. There is discontinuity between culture and society: good effects do not always flow from good causes. Although Rabelais never says so, he may have realized that one major reason for this is that cultural communities — theological readers for one, courtiers for another, humanists for a third, the hoi polloi gathered around shop doors for a fourth^[12] — do not normally have the kind of close communicative contact with each other that the intersecting social groups of his time did. Thoughts are relatively free — and idiosyncratic — because they are relatively distant from the body's involvements and quite far indeed from the thoughts of other people in different cultural milieus. That freedom has its consequences, one of which is ideological rigidity.

Rabelais's friends were his readers, but few of his readers had close contact with each other's ideas. He drew the conclusion: the prologue to the Fourth Book addresses itself to a community existing in scattered, physically unknowable form, united by an invisible and socially ineffective trait, that of wishing the author of the Pantagrueline tales well. Elaboration of the countertextual strategies to be analyzed in this chapter was the joint creation of a literary inclination (it is obvious that Rabelais had a flair for satire), an at least half-conscious sociology, and a most assuredly conscious political reaction to the threat to his books. It had the unexpected and, I think, unintended consequence of contributing to the construction of a cultural realm, that of literature, which has its own criteria of value and which has over centuries gradually come to be recognized by the very powers so often threatening it as possessing a peculiar but inevitable, dangerous but essential, autonomy from everyday life and its sanctions.^[13]

We will limit analysis of Rabelais's countertextual mockery in this chapter to its use in the Fourth Book at the most sensitive point of his text, the point at which contact with and defense against readers is normally strongest: the introductory paratexts. We begin by looking again at the prologue to the incomplete Fourth Book of 1548 so as to establish a comparative means of measuring the more formalized strategy of 1552.

[12] See p. 28, the anonymous quotation from 1496, and Fig. 1.

[13] As I write, the scandals over D. H. Lawrence's "obscene" Lady Chatterley's Lover and Ezra Pound's "fascist" Cantos are being played out again, in even more personally threatening terms, around Salman Rushdie's "sacrilegious" Satanic Verses (New York, 1989).

"Illustrious boozers and you my precious gouty friends, I have seen, received, heard, and understood the ambassador which the Lordship of your Lordships has sent to my Paternity." Sometime in 1547 Rabelais traveled to the Roman See for the third time: the unctuous gravity of the curial setting inaugurates the 1548 prologue. The "Lordship of your Lordships" presents the prologue narrator with a "breviary" that contains not the liturgical texts which a monk from the Hyères Islands should chant at prescribed times but instead a bottle or bottles inscribed with rules for drinking:^[14] "So you wish that at prime I should drink white wine, at the third, sixth, and ninth hour, the same; at vespers and complin, claret . . . . I grant the request." The reference to breviary here does not lead the reader to an abyss, like that in the description of Quaresmeprenant in the later Fourth Book . The satire of ecclesiastical complacency and self-interest is sharp and direct, concealed just enough to be called a subtext. At the surface is ambassadorial protocol, requiring the taking of wine according to rule. Just below the surface is a monastery drunk who drinks, perhaps, alone. No convivial suggestion to share in the wine and to toast each other intervenes, unlike the case in previous prologues. However, a convivial exchange does take place — words for wine — however official and however physically remote. The motif remains but is significantly transformed.

"You say the wine of the Third Book was to your taste . . . . And you copiously invite me to continue the Pantagrueline history, allegating the utilities and fruits received from its reading by all men of worth [gens de bien]." The separation of good from bad readers in partly moral and partly social terms proceeds:

Responding I say and maintain, up to the point of burning [at the stake] (you understand: for obvious reasons), that you are exalted men of worth [grandz gens de bien], all descended from good mothers and good fathers, and I promise you, with the word of a commoner [literally, foot soldier, foi de piéton: inversion of foi de chevalier, as in the English proverbial phrase, "word of a gentleman"] that if I ever meet you in Mesopotamia  . . .  you shall receive a fine Nile crocodile [in return for the breviary].^[15]

[14] The identity of the prologue speaker in the prologue Of 1548 (entitled "Prologue du Quart Livre") is not stated (contrast the prologue Of 1552, entitled "Prologue de l'autheur"), but, because the title page identifies the author as "François Rabelais, doctor in medicine and monk from the Hyeres, Islands," presumably it is he.

[15] QL, Pr 1548, 755.

The prologue of 1548 hops and skips between this aping of ambassadorial custom and that of a law court hearing the narrator's case against the slanderers of his books. Among the prologue's many fine inventions is maintenance of the fiction inaugurated by the narrator when he says, "O worthy people, I can't see you!"^[16] The flow of discourse is interrupted five times in fifteen paragraphs by seemingly confused queries to the narrator's interlocutors, as if the narrator were hard of hearing as well as poor of eyesight: "You say what? That you have not been irritated by anything in all my books  . . .  ? You pronounce judgment. What? To whom? All the old quarters of the moon to the caphards, cagots, matagots."^[17]

The law court reference is of course to the Parlement of Paris, which in 1545 and again in 1546 had confirmed the Sorbonne's censure of Rabelais's books. The narrator's imaginary law court inverts the behavior of the real one, finding Rabelais's books blameless and the slanderers guilty. "I pardon them," declares the narrator, but not "their malignities and impostures." Toward the latter, "I shall employ the offer made by Timon the Misanthropist to his ungrateful [fellow citizens] the Athenians." Converting himself into a hanging judge, he concludes — in parallel with the anecdote he recounts about Timon but in seeming contradiction with his "pardon" just a paragraph earlier — that "these diabolic slanderers shall all have to hang themselves during the last quarter of this moon. I shall furnish the nooses . . . . Once the moon renews, they'll not be accommodated so cheaply and will be forced to buy cord and choose a hanging tree on their own."^[18]

This conclusion, like the prologue generally, has been called contemptuous and uncompromising with respect to Rabelais's opponents, an "inflammatory text" whose irony is "acid sharp, not urbane and witty."^[19] It is indeed uncompromising and acidic but it is also urbane with its ambassadorial aping and witty with its law court inversion of Parlement's attack; most interestingly, it is implicitly self-critical by reason of the absurd hyperbole of its first fumbling and then forgotten pardons, its condemnations, and its modification of the condemna-

[16] See the opening pages of ch. 1 on this phrase and the contrasting ways it is used in 1548 and 1552.

[17] QL , Pr 1548, 755. This denunciatory passage and its context is discussed at greater length on pp. 34–35 above.

[18] QL, Pr 154–8, 757, 758.

[19] Schwartz, "Rhetorical Tensions" 25.

tions. Just as Rabelais in the Fourth Book exalts in new ways the sovereign command and philosophic wisdom of Pantagruel and at the same time pokes fun at the fellow's digressive vagueness, so also the author hangs out his anger to dry in this windy new-model prologue.

When Rabelais wrote the new prologue to the Fourth Book in 1552, his animal spirits revived, the acerbic quality had evaporated. This is the most buoyant of all his prologues, the most complex in its storytelling, and the most ironic in its doubly undercut narration. We have discussed its opening salutation, its Lenten game, its description of the author's happy state due to a pinch of Pantagruelism, and its ready invitation, so different from the 1548 prologue, to share. a glass of wine.^[20] The subject then turns with a pious flourish to the doctor's preoccupation with health and so moves to a theme that structures the remaining thirteen of its fifteen octavo pages: it is best to wish in moderation.^[21]

The subject is ostensibly homiletic: If your wishes are moderate, worthy people, God will reward the modesty. The Stoic-Christian lesson is illustrated with the story, adapted from Aesop, of a poor wood-cutter named Ballocker (Couillatris ) who loses his hatchet and clamors to the gods for it. Jupiter offers him a choice between a gold, a silver, and his own homely wooden-handled one; he chooses the latter, whereupon he is given all three and becomes rich. A corollary is added: Ballocker's neighbors, hearing his story, throw away their hatchets, too, but when they are offered the same choice they choose the gold-headed hatchet; for that they are, by order of Jupiter, beheaded.

Into this moralistic mold Rabelais pours all manner of other materials which so digress from it that its point is obscured and overwhelmed. The guiding thread in these distractions is the phallic theme announced with Ballocker's name and amplified in the ambivalent meaning of coignée : the word means "hatchet," but also "hatchet head"; the latter refers metaphorically to the female genitals, and as such is in

[20] See the end of ch. 1 and the middle of ch. 8.

[21] The theme of men's health is introduced immediately after the opening salutation and Lenten-game greeting. Dr. Rabelais states that his own health is good at both the beginning and the end of the prologue, but the considerable space given this theme in the 1552, prologue and the ironic turn given to each story about famous ancient doctors who thought they could maintain health through their art, makes one wonder if Rabelais's affirmations may not be an inversion of something worrying him, something that may have led the following year to his death. See also note 23.

common parlance juxtaposed to the hatchet handle, which doubles as the penis. The theme is emblazoned in tall red letters, so to speak, when the deliberations of the Olympian gods about Ballocker prove to be dominated by Priapus. Priapus sings bawdy songs, explains in ample detail the meaning of coignée, and tells a tale about a fox and a dog that itself digresses from the heaven-storming difficulties with which Priapus's sovereign, the great god Jupiter, is preoccupied. Jupiter is particularly troubled by the ruckus raised at Paris by two fellows called by Priapus "little testicle-shaped self-admirers," the logicians Peter Ramus and Peter Gallandus, who in the 1550s discussed with great hue and cry the significance of Aristotle for their discipline.

The verve of the narrative outruns all possible didactic point. The prologue is a careening mixture of ancient and modern, profane and sacred topoi that swerve away from and then unexpectedly collide with each other. Its zigzags are prescribed by the techniques of Menippean satire, as André Tournon and Jerome Schwartz have demonstrated.^[22] Two of these techniques were especially useful in developing the altered mode of contact between the represented author and readers of the text, initiated by Rabelais in 1548. One device gives examples and draws out the implications of a precept so that, instead of confirming the precept, subsequent discourse obliquely suggests its falsity.^[23] The other device inserts what seems to be an aside in a story, a passing comment that so develops as to displace the whole universe of discourse. The two techniques are alike in the sense that they both depend on exploiting the polysemic and eventually contradictory character of seemingly unexceptional commonplaces.

[22] See André Tournon, "Le Paradoxe ménippéen dans; l'oeuvre de Rabelais," Etudes rabelaisiennes 21 (1988): 309–17. Tournon, like Schwartz in "Rhetorical Tensions" emphasizes Rabelais's acquaintance with such techniques through his study of Lucian.

[23] Schwartz, "Rhetorical Tensions," 28–30, gives examples of this from the first part of the prologue. Galen was "completely healthy," Rabelais begins and then moves sideways: he had, of course, some "passing fevers" was "none of the healthiest by nature," and "evidently had a weak stomach." Asclepius, too, was never sick right up to an extreme old age, so that he was indeed "triumphant over Fortune" — except that he died by falling from the top of a rotten staircase. The reader is prepared for these attritions by Rabelais's displacement of a quotation from Luke (4:23–25), in which Jesus himself displaces the proverb, "Physician, heal thyself." Another demonstration of examples undermining precepts occurs in Schwartz's analysis of the Ramus-Galland digression in the prologue of 1552, ibid., 32–33.

The main example of the second technique has been mentioned: the story of the lost hatchet is developed so as to displace the theme from that of the wisdom of moderate desires to one of the necessity, for a man, of his hatchet handle. The phallic theme is overtly proclaimed everywhere in the story of Ballocker (the nickname means "testicled"; the woodcutter is immediately identified as well endowed) except at the moment of his choice of the restored hatchet. There the reader must drop below the surface of the text to read along lines only metaphorically indicated. In Tournon's paraphrase:

He "lifts the golden hatchet  . . .  he finds it rather heavy  . . .  That one is not mine . . . ." That is understandable: how is he going to "go to work," poor fellow, with that golden "hatchet" so heavy to lift? It's his own he wants, his "hatchet of wood, " says Rabelais, since it is especially the handle which counts . . . . When it is given back to him, he "attaches it to his leather belt, placing it under the backside [sous le cul]  . . . "; equipped with his tool at last  . . .  happy Ballocker can pronounce his "little word" of triumph: "Have I got it? [En ay-je?]"  . . .  Don't ask me to explain things more clearly.

Tournon's commentary terminates by indicating the unspoken relation between this story of lost and found erection and the prologue's first theme, men's health and how to safeguard it: To wish for the means of subsistence that insure health is natural; to desire those things that directly affect the body — one's "physical integrity, the exercise of one's vital energies, pleasure, and fecundity" — is still more so. Thus it is that the "priapic equivocation" of the text suffuses with "erotic joy" the totality of text.^[24]

Erotic indeed. The sense and sentiment of male physical vitality wells up and replaces the theme of sober desire without ado when the scene shifts from Dr. Rabelais's study with its medical books and Bible to the heavens of Olympus. The sexuality evoked by the prologue's piquant language is as male-centered as in the Sausage War episode or the talk of the Pantagruelian company generally.^[25]

The sexuality is male, and so are its discursive effects. The prologue

[24] Tournon, "Le Paradoxe ménippéen," 313.

[25] Priapus concludes his second commentary on Ballocker's predicament with a song: "'If hatchets unhelved are quite useless / and tools without handles no use too / Let's make one then fit into the other / I've a handle. Let the hatchet be you,'" at which words, continues the prologue author, "all the venerable gods and goddesses burst out laughing" and "Vulcan with his twisted leg did three or four pretty little jigs for love of his mistress," QL, Pr, 555.

springs from subject to subject like a young buck. The sedate beginning is forgotten; Rabelais's rabble-rousing readers return:

They [Ballocker's neighbors] chose the one of gold  . . .  but as they lifted it from the earth, bent over and stooping, Mercury cut off their heads, as Jupiter had decreed . . . . There you have it, that's what happens . . . . Take warning from that, you scabby fellows from the flat country,^[26] who say you wouldn't forego your wishes for ten thousand francs a year.

Faith in the Lord God, invoked with pious conventionality at the beginning, returns with onomatopoeic gusto at the end:

Hey, there, hey! And who taught you to prattle and talk of the power and predestination of God, poor people? Peace! Sh, sh, sh! Humble yourselves before his sacred visage and recognize your imperfections. It is on this, gouty ones, that I found my hopes.^[27]

Reference of any sort to predestination in the vexed theological ambience of the mid-sixteenth century in France was touchy business. The word carried a wide range of meanings whose nuances, Calvinist, Catholic, or other, all involved the reconciliation of God's omnipotence and omniscience with some version of human freedom. A loose interpretation of the words of this suddenly appearing preacher on the prologue scene would paraphrase it so: what people get in the way of wealth is fixed by almighty God, and so it does no good to talk about it. One should be as sober in religious talk as in one's desires. The subtext of such a clear and easy surface text answers the question of the preacher: Who taught you to talk of predestination? The heresiarch Calvin, of course.

A stricter and, as it happens, countertextual interpretation of the preacher voice would be: of course, what you get is fixed by God, but so indeed are wishes. To urge moderation in wishes is irrelevant because wishes like rewards are predestined. The moral of this story is that its moral is pointless. If this pointless point is indeed the one aimed at by Rabelais the author (as opposed to Dr. Rabelais, the author represented as narrating the prologue), then it is only the final turn in slowly undermining the prologue's ostensible theme.

[26] "Gualliers" in the epithet gualliers de plat pays refers to persons afflicted with galls, skin sores caused by rubbing. The epithet derives from Rabelais's medical experience, but at the same time signifies return to the motley, unsightly readers of earlier prologues, the poxy fellows infected with syphilis who are welcomed to his books.

[27] QL, Pr, 558–59.

Ballocker got back the "tool" he needs to "labor." He also became rich, while his greedy neighbors were killed. This is the point at which the unexpected preacher voice comes forward, scolding an audience of equally unexpected hecklers, unsavoury fellows full of scabs; the "worthy people" first greeted have disappeared. Yet is it not "dubious morality to excoriate materialism" — as seems to be done in Jupiter's execution of Ballocker's greedy neighbors — "by showering material gifts upon the simple Couillatris [Ballocker]"?^[28] From this perspective perhaps Ballocker's "little word" has another meaning, as he parades around his parish with the gold and silver hatchets slung around his neck: "En ay-je" can equally well be translated, "Haven't I got some?"^[29]

He has. The following paragraph dwells with delectation on Ballocker's canny conversion of his two superfluous but precious hatchets into coins and then into farmlands, farm animals, mills, forests, ponds, and much else. No wonder, then, that his neighbors threw away their hatchets and yelled to the heavens for Jupiter's help. But their destiny, pursues the prologue author, like that of anyone who wishes for too much, is cankerous, consuming sickness and death.^[30]

The preacher, in fact, promises nothing else. "Wish, then, for mediocrity [médiocrité: a middling, modest situation]" the preacher pursues. "It will come to you, and even better duly [deuement: in due time?] if meanwhile you labor and work." The "it" refers not to wishes, as a careless French reader — and many readers of unclear English translations — might think, but to mediocrity.^[31] When he continues "and even better duly," this laconic phrase is overtranslated — and so it is in many English translations — if it is taken to mean "and even better

[28] Schwartz, "Rhetorical Tensions," 34.

[29] The useful French "en" takes its precise meaning from linguistic context. To translate as literally as possible, one would write: "have I of it?" But even such a literal effort is not really literal, making four words out of three. Traduttore, traditore .

[30] Rabelais in QL, Pr, 558–59, adds other examples of people with excessive wishes and warns of the illnesses that often then ensue, thus rejoining the theme of health. Schwartz's interpretation of the preaching attributes a some-what too Protestant moralism to the prologue author, "Rhetorical Tensions," 33–34. The prologue author is not preaching against "materialism;" nor does he suppose that virtues should be their own reward or that they should be rewarded exclusively in the afterlife.

[31] QL, Pr, 559: "Souhaitez done médiocrité: elle vous adviendra": le souhait is a masculine noun from the verb souhaiter; la médiocriteé is feminine; elle grammatically refers therefore to médiocrité .

things than you have wished for, in due time."^[32] The phrase, taken at its face value, and connected with either the following words that complete it or the preceding words about mediocrity, simply says: if you work away, you'll get better "duly," that is, in accordance with either the way you work or your properly mediocre wishes. The preacher says nothing about showers of riches from heaven.

The preacher's empty words are rejected with accuracy by his scabby back-country auditors: "But, you say, God could just as well have given me seventy-eight millions as the thirteenth part of a half [-penny]." This is the moment when the sermonizer thunders, "Quiet there! God has predestined everyone's fortunes and who are you to dare talk about it?" — which makes wishes great or small quite irrelevant.

Why does this displacement flow along so easily? It is, as I suggested in chapter 1, a question of not only Rabelais's personal skills as a storyteller and rhetorician but also of his use of the tools offered him by his context. The inchoateness of printed book conventions made it easier to think about mixtures of the rather rigid and narrow conventions of manuscript books with the panoply of oral storytelling techniques. Imitation of oral storytelling traditions rendered more rhetorically acceptable the shifts from one subject, one register of rhetorical appeal, one universe of discourse to others. Orality is flow; swift change and even inconsequence in subject matter is a condition of retaining contact with an easily distracted audience, in contrast to the concentrated attention on which one can count in readers. Awareness of the ironic effects in the prologue just noted depends in fact on readers' ability to turn back the pages and note with care the points at which the argument is dislocated. The presence of a countertext may be sensed in the swift-flowing movement from proposition to example to objection and back to apparent reiteration, but it can hardly be ascertained without the close reading that reveals gradual destruction of the initial proposition due to small phrases, grammatical referents, and polysemic slippage.

This situation of simultaneous sensitivity to oral and written techniques of persuasion and argument was Rabelais's context, not ours,

[32] See Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen, 448: "So wish in moderation. What you ask will come to you, and better things, too, if you toil hard at your own work in the meantime." Rabelais, The Portable Rabelais, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York, 1946), 547: "Do your wishing, then, in moderation, and you will get all you wish for and more still, providing that you only work and labor in the meanwhile."

which may be one reason why twentieth-century scholars have one-sidedly lionized his writing skills — and those of the other great storytellers surrounding him in France — Marguerite of Navarre, Bonaventure des Periers, Noël du Faïl — not to mention those in other countries. They are analyzed and lauded too often one by one, so that the dual cultural atmosphere they shared and exploited — oral and written, printed and proclaimed — is only dimly perceived.

Rabelais's ironic retelling of the Aesopian tale of Ballocker not only undermines the sententious wisdom of Stoic-Christian prescriptions.^[33] It also belies Pantagruelism. How did Ballocker get the attention of the gods and move them to their reward? By making an infernal racket. Ballocker bewailed his fate, his unfair fortune, his awful predicament, "calling aloud indefatigably after each chapter of his prayers, 'My hatchet, Jupiter! my hatchet, my hatchet! only my hatchet or the money to buy another! Alas, my poor hatchet! The clamor was so loud and long that "it was heard with great astonishment  . . .  in the very consistory of the gods. 'What devil is it down there?' asked Jupiter, 'howling so horribly?' "^[34]

This behavior, not the Pantagruelists' gaily spirited disdain of fortuitous things, was adopted by the real author, in contrast to his prologue representation of himself.^[35] Rabelais howled so loudly and horribly — witness the prologues to the Third Book and the 1548 incomplete Fourth Book — that the great gods of censorship in France answered his prayers. He paraded the results as proudly as Ballocker did his hatchets. The order of the first edition of the Fourth Book in early 1552 was: title page; dedicatory letter "To the most illustrious prince and most reverend monseigneur Odet, Cardinal of Châtillon" dated January 28, 1552; privilege in the name of Henry II, King of France, dated August 6, 1550 and signed "By the King, Cardinal Châtillon present, countersigned Du Thier"; prologue; and text.

[33] Undermines but does not undo it. The example of Zachaeus's modest wish to see Jesus, and Jesus' reward to him by visiting him and blessing his family, is told without irony: QL, Pr, 547. The points of unsatirized seriousness in the prologue — this is not the only one — function to set off the irony of the rest more strongly.

[34] QL, Pr, 549.

[35] See the discussion of Pantagruelism. near the end of ch. 8, which includes quotation of the definition at the beginning of this prologue, QL, Pr, 545.

It is as if Rabelais intended his readers to see first his appeal for help and then its results, even though this order inverts the dates of composition of the dedication and privilege. The publisher, Fézandat in Paris, probably did not choose this order, since it was in the publisher's interest to manifest royal authorization as clearly and hence as quickly as possible in terms of the book's pagination. The wordy and circumstantial royal privilege, rather unusual for the times, seems almost to have been dictated in some parts by Rabelais.

On behalf of our dear and well beloved M. François Rabelais, doctor in medicine, it has been represented to us that,  . . .  having given to be printed several books  . . .  including certain volumes concerning the heroic deeds and sayings of Pantagruel, no less useful than delectable, the printers had corrupted, depraved, and perverted the said books in a number of places. They had further printed some other scandalous books under the name of the suppliant to his great displeasure, prejudice and ignominy, books totally disavowed by him as false and counterfeit.^[36]

Or, as the dedicatory letter put it, and as the reader had already been informed if reading through the edition of 1552,

King Francis  . . .  was informed about these slanders [concerning Rabelais's alleged heresies] and, having heard and comprehended these my several distinct books (I say it [i.e., he specifies that the Pantagrueline novels were issued in several separate volumes] because certain other false and infamous counterfeit ones have been attributed to me)  . . .  had found no passage suspect, [although one fellow] based mortal heresy on an N placed where an M should have been through the fault and negligence of the printers.

Francis's son, "our so good, so virtuous, heavenly blessed King Henry (may God preserve him long among us) also had [heard the public reading?], so that he granted to you for me a privilege and particular protection against the slanderers."^[37] Thus the privilege assures that:

We, agreeing fully to the supplication and request of the said A François Rabelais  . . .  give the right  . . .  to him to have printed and again placed on sale all and each of the said books and the sequel to Pantagruel  . . .  and at the same time to suppress those which have been falsely attributed to him . . . . Ceasing and causing to cease all troubles and impediments to the contrary, for such is our desire.^[38]

[36] Privilège du Roy, 339.

[37] QL, DL, 543.

[38] Privilege du Roy, 339–40.

Little wonder that the final paragraphs of the dedicatory letter approach the limits of encomiastic hero-worship. Cardinal Odet's favor leads the author to hope that "you will be to me, against my slanderers, like a second Gallic Hercules in knowledge, wisdom, and eloquence, a [Hercules] Alexicacos in virtue, power, and authority, one of whom I may truthfully say what was said of Moses  . . .  by the wise King Solomon." A long quotation from the book of Ecclesiasticus ensues, which calls Moses and hence Odet a man chosen of God, made "like to the glorious saints  . . .  so that his enemies stood in fear of him."^[39] The praise is indeed grandiose. Are they Ballocker's naive tactics or Lucian's mocking ones, treading a tightrope "between protocol and parody"?^[40]

This near syncophancy is neither greater nor more serious than that exhibited in the fresco covering a half-dome space in the family chateau of Tanlay near Châtillon-sur-Loing, where the three brothers Châtillon, with Diane de Poitiers, King Henry II, and some other courtly figures, are depicted as Olympian gods and goddesses looking down in a row, frontally posed, on whoever happens in, with many of the women and some of the men voluptuously, virilely nude. Rabelais is playing the courtier's game, using a different but complementary rhetoric to that employed in the prologue, a rhetoric that allows him, as in the rest of his writing, to remain so well masked as to be nearly invisible.^[41]

To little avail. The Fourth Book , published at the end of January, was condemned on March 1 by Parlement at the request of the Sorbonne. Rabelais did not abandon his tactics; he redoubled them. As Michael Screech and Stephen Rawles have demonstrated, a new edition was hastily assembled in which an amended version of the prologue appears.

In the opening paragraphs of the prologue where the subject is personal health and how to retain it, Rabelais includes another of his mocking plays upon legal principles, the one in question being "the dead seizes upon the living" (le mort saisit le vif ). This principle had been explicated by a one-time friend of Rabelais, André Tiraqueau, with whom the author was apparently irritated for a number of reasons, among other things because of Tiraqueau's omission of Rabelais's

[39] QL, DL, 543–44.

[40] Schwartz, "Rhetorical Tensions,"27.

[41] The rather risqué scene, whose chief subject is the Judgment of Paris, is reproduced in Louis Réau, Richesses d'art de la France: la Bourgogne, la peinture (Paris, 1929), plate 13.

name from a list of famous doctors cited in one of Tiraqueau's works.^[42] Already in the first edition of the Fourth Book Rabelais paid back this slighting omission by according the legist manifestly excessive mention in this passage:

Good God! Good fellows! Is it not prescribed and practiced by the ancient customs of this most noble, most flourishing, most rich and triumphant realm of France, that the dead seizes upon the living? Note the recent exposition of this principle by the good, the learned, the wise, the most humane, most gracious and just And. Tiraqueau, counsellor of King Henry, second of that name, in his most dreaded Parlement at Paris.^[43]

Ah, yes. Tiraqueau was among those who as a royal lawyer in the Parlement of Paris influenced in one way or another, by omission or commission, the condemnations of Rabelais's books. That too played its part in the composition of this reference whose context in the fantasmatic prologue, as opposed to similar hyperbole about Odet de Châtillon in the dedicatory letter, makes countertextual mockery very probable. Not so the changes that Rabelais made in the second edition of this passage, probably between April and June 1552.^[44] The references to Henry II and his kingdom are augmented and inflated, while the rest of the words remain the same:

Is it not prescribed and practiced by the ancient customs of this most noble, most venerable, most beautiful, most flourishing, most rich realm of France  . . .  ? Note the recent exposition  . . .  by  . . .  Tiraqueau, counsellor of the great, victorious, and triumphant King Henry.^[45]

Screech and Rawles suggest that this amended edition was presented to King Henry and his place in it displayed. That is the reason, it is conjectured, that further legal proceedings against the Fourth Book were quashed.

[42] See Schwartz, "Rhetorical Tensions," 30, n. 14., on this question. There were other issues between the two longtime acquaintances, having to do with Tiraqueau's comments on marriage laws, which play a part in Rabelais's Third Book . See Screech, Rabelais, esp. 213, 273.

[43] See the first edition (Jan. 1552; not reprinted in QL, Pr, 547) in NRB , 238, Fig. 46.2, a facsimile from the first edition.

[44] See NRB, 244, and the preceding discussion, 242–44, in portions of which some contradictory statements about the probable date of the second edition are made.

[45] NRB , 239, Fig. 46.4, a facsimile from the second edition; italics added.

Jerome Schwartz concludes from his perspicacious reading of the liminary texts to the Fourth Book that the dedicatory letter and prologue are written for "two audiences, two levels of the social hierarchy  . . .  two sets of standards and values." One uses "grand, rhetorical style" to influence the great; the other "invokes in comic style the humble goutteux [gouty ones] in their modest, simple, limited hope for life and health." But Schwartz's very perception of the mocking and self-critical details in both documents undermines any such clear division.^[46] Three kinds of readers are envisioned, not two, and the eyes of all of them would peruse all, not one rather than another in the whole proud parade of documents opening the Fourth Book : one category of reader includes high, elite, official, or exalted persons socially and culturally; the second mixes persons high and low in social estate and is unpretentious and popular in taste; the third, also indeterminate socially but not so easy to describe culturally, is an audience of mockers, a group of readers not necessarily Pantagruelist although certainly not slanderers, identified less by ideological inclinations or particular cultural style than by the ability to interpret signs at several, often conflicting levels of meaning.

The three audiences have been amply indicated in preceding pages with respect to the prologue to the Fourth Book . They are equally present in the dedicatory letter. Rabelais begins by placing himself in the same milieu as that of the persons he addresses: you are aware, prince, of how many great persons have been urging me to continue my Pantagrueline fictions, he writes. As he inaugurates his first theme he maintains this cultural context. It is the theme of the doctor concerned for his patients' health, the theme of the writer who heals his readers' grieved spirits with amusing stories.^[47] But humor is a rhetorical slide. It pulls discourse toward mixed effects and mixed audiences. Physicians should present a happy mien to ailing patients, Dr. Rabelais explains; they should never depress them through arrogance or indifference. A sick man once asked the physician Callianax — the narrator obviously still addresses primarily elite readers here, people who are humanist students of the classics — about his disease, "questioning him in the

[46] Schwartz, "Rhetorical Tensions," 35–36. Schwartz deals with the question of mocking undertones by calling them "tensions" such that the two writings, functioning "dialectically," diverge as well as complement each other.

[47] The theme is present from the first of the prologues onward.

fashion of noble Pathelin: 'Does not my urine tell you I shall die?' " You won't, answered the flippant doctor, provided that '"Latona, mother of Apollo and Diana, was the one who bore you.'"

You and I, my Cardinal, have seen or heard of the famous play about a shyster lawyer named Pathelin. With this reference to an anonymous farce written several generations before Rabelais's time, Rabelais beckons to a second audience.^[48] "'You've had your lunch, doctor; your breath smells of wine!'" runs Rabelais's next anecdote. "'Yours smells of fever,' the doctor replied! Urination and fever, breathing and smelling: such bodily references mix all classes of readers. What are they doing here, if Rabelais is only interested in wheedling the cardinal for political ends? He isn't.

In the fashion of the "noble" Pathelin trickster, writes Rabelais. This false social designation is the first mocking move, the first signal to the reader to take his distance from these representations. The second comes in the following paragraph, as Rabelais moves to his chief theme, the slanders upon him and the support of kings and courtiers. Although the surface context shifts back to an elite conversation between the author and an exalted person about others high and low, the subcontext remains satiric and also broadly popular. The slanderers who regard the author as a heretic treat Rabelais's nourishing books as if they were stones, snakes, and scorpions. Rabelais sarcastically employs Jesus' words to his disciples (Luke 11:11–12) against his sanctimonious adversaries; the reference would have been recognized not only by prelates like Odet but by the many whose daily, weekly, yearly bread, fish, and eggs were the preacher's homilies.^[49] Rabelais's dramatic offer to heap up wood and offer himself like a phoenix to the flames, should any "spark" of heresy be found in him to ignite such a pile, is another piece of self-consuming bravado: The phoenix burn only to be reborn. We have already discussed the ambivalence of the final paragraphs, threading their way between hyperbole and parody.

In the dedicatory letter as in the prologue Rabelais asks readers to perceive the representation of two audiences of mixed social origin but contrasting social status and power and a third audience of mockers and skeptics. There are two kinds of reader-listeners with their faces crowded around the book, well-clothed or shabby, sedate or silly, and there is a third kind further away, reflective and smiling. My guess,

[48] Maistre Pierre Pathelin, ed. Richard Holbrook (Paris, 1967); this play is one of the most well-known examples of late medieval French popular theater.

[49] See the quotation on p. 212.

pending further probes, is that Rabelais's orientation to these three different audiences emerges with stylistic distinctness after the mid-1540s. Nurtured during the eleven years of compositional silence (except for revisions) between 1535 and 1546 as Rabelais apparently pondered the metatexts gathering around his works and name, incipient in the prologue and through the text of the Third Book as well as in the prologue of 1548, the triple appeal became inseparable from composition of the full Fourth Book and inseparable too from its full understanding then and now.

There are no limits to Rabelais's irony in the Fourth Book . His countertextual proclivity for disingenuous hyperbole is transferred without compunction from the prologue of 1548 to the dedicatory letter of 1552, that is, from a paratextually designated "secondary" world of factitious ambassadorial politeness to a paratextually designated "primary" world of pragmatic officialdom.

Complacency:

1548: "You say what? That you have not been irritated by anything in all my books?" "It is a wonderful thing to be praised by the praiseworthy," as Horace used to say, as Cicero reports about Hector, etc.^[50]

1552: King Francis "found no passage suspect . . . . King Henry  . . .  granted to you for me a privilege and particular protection," which you, Cardinal Odet, mentioned to me at Cardinal du Bellay's St. Maur chateau, that "paradise of salubrity, amenity, serenity, commodity," etc.^[51]

Innocence:

1548: "You say the wine of the Third Book was to your taste and that it is good . . . . And you copiously invite me to continue the Pantagrueline history, allegating the utilities and fruits received from its reading by all men of worth" writes the doctor-monk-official; he adds that he graciously pardons the ambassador-reader for laughing at his books, explaining that he is "not so savage [farouche, as in Ferocious Island, as on the Hyères Islands] or implacable as you think."^[52]

[50] QL, Pr 1548, 754–55.

[51] QL, DL, 543.

[52] QL, Pr 1548, 754–55.

1552: "Gay fooling there is in plenty, offensive neither to God nor the King . . . . Heresies there are none, unless one were  . . .  to interpret them in such a way that I would a thousand times rather have died."^[53]

Accusation:

1548: "You pronounce judgment. What? To whom? All the old quarters of the moon to the caphards, cagots, matagots . . . . If by these terms you mean the slanderers of my writings, you could more properly call them devils. For in Greek calumny is called diabole. You see how detestable the sin of calumny is before God and the angels (that is, when one impugns good deeds or speaks evil of good things) since  . . .  they are named and called devils of hell.)" although they are "properly speaking" only the "ministers" of hell's devils.^[54]

1552: "The slander of certain cannibals, misanthropes, and age-lastes was so outrageous and beyond all reason that I lost all patience:" Such people have fallen into the clutches of a "slandering demon, a diabolos [in contrast to the 1548 prologue, the word is printed here with Greek letters] who uses them to accuse me of such a crime" as heresy.^[55]

But of course every courtier knows that the world of official politeness is as artificial as any world of the imagination. This was even more true in the sixteenth century than at later periods because both kinds of world were less defined than they later became-vis-à-vis their ambience of intersecting social groups. The world of literature gradually attained a certain autonomy; so did the State.^[56]

The author is always masked. The question to ask about the real author's relation to text is not what or who represents him or her but where do the author's personae place themselves with respect not only

[53] QL, DL, 542.

[54] QL, Pr 1548, 755.

[55] QL, DL, 542.

[56] Like the doctrine of raison d'état, which gradually raised state power and the officials embodying it above and beyond the play of social interests characteristic of feudal political institutions, the success of doctrines suggesting the independence of literature was a result of new social and cultural circumstances in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Schwartz's idea that Rabelais wrote for two quite distinct audiences in the dedicatory letter and prologue applies better to paratextual protocol in Racine's time and afterward.

to represented but to real contexts. The reason for developing answers to this question of "where" by emphasizing the paratexts is that Rabelais more than most authors seems to have sought to place his authorial personae as precisely as possible halfway between his fictional contexts and the contexts beyond them. Not distinctions of intertextuality but the unraveling of Rabelais's intercon textuality has been a major purpose of this study. Pursuit of such distinctions is most valuable in explaining how Rabelais was led to stud his text with contemporary references broad and narrow, particular and generalizing, a technique that has made his writing opaque to later generations, obscuring not only its verbal beauties but much of its comedy.

The paratexts do not function in these novels as an exit from everyday life into a new world but as a gate between two kinds of reality, a gate that swings both ways. Instead of using paratext to pull readers in one direction only, into a book world separate from readers' lives, Rabelais uses it to peek out on the world beyond. "Ha, ha!  . . .  I see you!"

People say my gay fooling causes mischief, that I should be silenced — but consider Ballocker. Did he cease to squabble? No, of course not. And in the end he went proudly to Chinon with his badges of triumph round his neck, to Chinon, that "famous town, noble town, ancient town, the finest town in the world, as learned Hebrew scholars maintain."^[57] Chinon is Rabelais's home town. The author peeks out and pulls what he sees back in, and not only in the prologues, of course. Readers, like authors, are folded into the tale. "You are making fun of me here, boozers . . . . Go see for yourselves . . . . It was on Ferocious Island, I give you its name." The communities of the tale, the writing of the author, spill over into the sphere of readership. The mode of communication presupposes shared interests and shared activities. Dispersing the narrator transforms the sender of this communication into a member of groups that include the readers rather than establish him beyond the reach of the narrative and therefore also beyond the ken of readers. By the same device space is created for conflict among narrative voices without the disruption of all meaning. Narrative discontinuities

[57] QL, Pr, 556.

function as comic play rather than as the bottomless pit of split personality.^[58]

But these tactics are only gestures, not realities, for the gates of signification are moveable by authors of books only toward other words, not deeds. Only under one set of conditions, perhaps, does the word spinner of fictions reach beyond language in enduring and efficacious ways: the conditions of ritual. When speaker and audience share the same. opinion of the way in which signifying systems apply to reality — the kind of trust given in tribal societies to myth-telling masters of ritual — collective fictions may seem truth; dancing may lead to rain. Such shared understanding of fictions' performative power diminishes in proportion to the impersonality of the sender-receiver tie. As it disappears, the fiction writer's words are more and more liable to be misinterpreted. Dog-faced sourpusses rend the cultural consensus.^[59] The fiction writer is tempted to stop writing altogether.

This is Rabelais's context. Greeting his readers, flattering his patron, he insists at the entrance to the Fourth Book that readers and patron develop a second strategy in addition to Silenus-box reading of surface and subtext, for in this way they, the scattered heterogeneous crowd of his well-wishers, may still be able to laugh at the dissonant irreconcilables around them.

Do not read simply above and below the lines, but obliquely, athwart the text's seeming thrust. Do not attend alone to the enfolding embrace of my words, to the mixture of cultural milieus, to the kaleidoscopic variety of my changing social alliances. Develop precisely by means of my evocation of an ideal social compatibility founded in communal closeness, in resonance with my invocation of an impossible Pantagruelist social calm founded on the sense of human identity, a detachment from the text, these words, and any others.^[60]

The paratextual parade Of 1552 — dedicatory letter, royal privilege, prologue amenities, and some months later a prologue amended to offer further gratification to His Majesty Henry II — was not simply de-

[58] See the beginning of ch. 8 and ch. 8, n. 4, on the modern literary episteme. The readerly groups in the Fourth Book, unlike earlier books, have been restricted at the outset to "well-wishing readers." The reduced and more defensive communalism affirmed in the Fourth Book allows this folding-in of readers to continue.

[59] That is, "cannibals." See Appendix 3.

[60] See n. 11 above concerning communalism as social ideal, not social description.

veloped on political grounds or, still more simply, out of elitist disgust with and despair about the attitudes of common readers. One-dimensional interpretations like these cannot account for such seemingly minute revisions in 1552 as adding the morally selective "Good people" to the salutation of the prologue to the Third Book and the socially selective "worthy people, to the narrator's apostrophic turn toward readers near the end of it, while not deleting the popularizing references to riff-raff boozers and sufferers from gout which the emendations accompany.^[61] Rabelais's new system augments references at the surface of the text to those whom I call his third audience, the audience of ironic readers. It renders the text more shifty even as it accommodates the text to more officious uses. Rabelais disconnects his imaginary world from that of the hard-to-discern and even harder-to-calculate world of miscellaneous cultural milieus; he seeks to protect it from the cross-sawing exigencies of diverse ideological interests by playing the courtier's game. But he retains representation in his imaginary world of the rough-and-tumble world of miscellaneous social milieus. This was essential. This is where his stories get their salt. It is why his text is studded with contemporary references. Seen from the referential angle of meaning, the text is woven of attacks on law, medicine, theology, monasticism, and — more circumspectly, but no less unmistakeably — on royal politics. That his stories are offensive to neither God nor King are the most duplicitous words Rabelais ever wrote.

Rabelais's later career was passed not with recalcitrant monks, vagabond students, youthfully ambitious humanists and idealist evangelicals, but with grave men of power, usually generous-minded as far as we can ascertain but nonetheless ponderous with responsibilities and dangerous because of that. There is certainly in the Fourth Book a shift in Rabelais's sense of what is socially possible; that is implicit in the developing importance of ironic reading. But no determinate social or political philosophy can be found there. Nor should the shift in social sentiment be taken to imply any change in the author's subversive cultural sensibility. Rabelais remains inclined to bring the high low, to identify with the broadly popular, to expose to phallic and scatological ridicule every high and mighty pose, whatever the impulse to grant greater fictional sanction to his society's most deeply rooted communities: family, peasantry, royalty, the Christian church.

The advice offered readers in the prologue to Gargantua was Panta-

[61] TL, Pr, 341, 350.

gruelist in tone and assumptions. Given time and the appetizing presentation of agreeable words, a text will be savored like wine and sucked like a bone for its marrow. Surface and subtext will come to coordinated comprehension. The advice offered readers in the prologue to the Fourth Book is neither so direct nor so optimistic: restrain yourselves; things are not what they seem. Although surface and subtext may show harmony, it is not necessarily so. Pantagruelist attitudes to the text are neither discouraged nor denied, but they are put in question by their ironic supplement.^[62] Dr. Rabelais and his worthy initial interlocutors in the prologue fade away pari passu with the disappearance first of the moral theme and then of the moral meaning. At the end we are back with the usual crowd listening to the usual speaker: that town-square and village-tavern bookseller, amateur of Galen, storytelling minstrel, and good-time-Charley whose function, it finally appears, is not so much to amuse, instruct, or impress, to preach, orate, or bore-let alone to mystify à plus hault sens^[63] — as simply to render the reader immune to the blandishments of any and all of these, treacherous or well meaning as they may be.

What cues does Rabelais offer readers to develop such immunity? Most obviously he accents the falsehood of his representations of himself, his readers, and their mode of contact. Less obviously he constructs contrasts between the patterns of oral and written discursiveness. The prologues initiate these books in conversational or oratorical style; the texts begin just as regularly in the mode of written chronicle. The plot unfolds with the largesse and meandering ease of an oral storyteller's audience-attentive art. It is interrupted ever and again by law-book, medical-book, shipfaring, warmaking, grammaticalizing, poetizing passages that play upon written forms of communication. The reader is ever being urged to move on, turn the page, and follow the

[62] Thus the Pantagruelist last phrase of the prologue of 1552 (QL, Pr, 559: "Or, en bonne santé toussez un bon coup, beuvez en trois, secouez dehait vos aureilles, et vous oyrez dire merveilles du noble et bon Pantagruel") seems to shake off the immediately preceding repetition of the morality of moderation. Conversely, however, this same preceding moralism (a reference to the avaricious Genoese) casts doubt on the meaning of the brief, subsequent reappearance of the Pantagruelist trait: the latter may be simply a convenient way of turning to the text. Each of the last two turns of the prologue lends irony to the other.

[63] That is, to find a higher, recondite meaning within the text. See the discussion of the prologue to Gargantua in ch. 8.

flow; but the accumulation of contrastive styles whispers that it would be well to reverse the action, flip back the pages, review the running discourse and note the implications of its illogic. The pages of a printed, bound, handy-sized book of moderate cost allowed the latter to be done with a frequency and facility unknown in the age of manuscripts.

Demonstration of the communalist assumptions found in the Rabelaisian text centered on the way authorial and readerly personae, given multiple form, overlap without replicating each other. Faced with an impersonal medium, using the inchoateness of its new printed form, Rabelais created a peculiar type of paratext in which the scattered and distant partners in printed communication appear pressed together, jostling each other and the author in remarkably sensuous ways. Giving them an artificial and embodied closeness, Rabelais moved the more easily among heterodox discourses, varying praise and abuse, high titles and low, friendliness and scorn.

For Rabelais the social fact of communal closeness led on naturally to the social ideal of conviviality. Conviviality was not represented simply as an atmosphere generated among the Pantagruelian actors in his books; allegiance to it, acceptance of its importance to good living was considered, at least in the early books, as indispensable to the real reader's understanding of the real author's intentions. Such were the implications to be drawn from the prologue to Gargantua . Correct understanding of my books, Rabelais implies, arises in the atmosphere of conviviality, just as it has been part and parcel of my composition of them. Pantagruelism, which in this early book is nearly identical with conviviality, is not a Platonic Christian essence, acquired through moral exercise and divine help. It is a materially and communally engendered aspect of the body social and arises, like the flow of animal spirits from heart to brain in the body natural, from good fellowship and good imbibing.

This connection of "wine"-inspired reading with "wine"-inspired writing signified the embracing cultural action enacted and hence indirectly advocated by Rabelais in his earlier novels. Of course literature, distilling experience, offers readers as well as creators an intoxicating realm of special, ideal meanings. But the creation as well as the understanding of such a secondary world always takes place in reciprocity with daily life, with a first world in connection with — not in reflection of — the intercontexts through which and by means of which writers

and readers think, feel, and conclude. At their fullest, words thus act upon those who distill them and imbibe them like double-action drugs, cheering up lives with fight-hearted stories while injecting at the same time a dozen kinds of other thoughts and referents and verbal felicities.

This construction foundered. The obsessively reiterated denunciations of those attacking him make Rabelais's statements in the dedicatory letter about losing all desire to write relatively credible. Although the books never ceased to sell and patrons never abandoned him, Rabelais seems to have needed some more express response from the generality of his readers or perhaps less express response from the minority of his enemies. We have indicated a number of culturally and historically conditioned reasons for such attitudes in these enemies, in contemporary readers, and in Rabelais himself; one might add to these reasons, as far as Rabelais goes, the factors of the author's age and acquired experience. Whatever the reasons, Rabelaisian idealism declined. The character of Pantagruelism changed. In 1534. Pantagruelists "live in peace, joy, and good health, always making good cheer"; communalism is consonant with humanism, anyone may potentially join with anyone else in such conviviality. By 1552 it has become a personal faith, an individual's mode of resistance to life's troubles. The communalism that continues to exist in the Fourth Book is no longer necessarily part of Pantagruelism.^[64]

In the midst of the Fourth Book even this chastened redefinition of Pantagruelism seems to break down. Rabelais shows Pantagruel erupting in anger at the behavior of the dog-faced men, incapable of laughter, who are Anti-Nature's children. Pantagruel betrays Pantagruelism, at least at the surface of the text. From a countertextual point of view, however, the situation is less clear.

By making explicit, as he habitually does, the differences between the position and points of view of author, narrator, and narrative actors, Rabelais requires his readers to regard any utterance by any of his characters as having several aspects. "Pantagruel" erupts, or rather Alcofri-

[64] One might consider, however, the selective communalism of the Fourth Book to be in consonance with the new definition of Pantagruelism in the prologue to the Third Book: "those who possess it [Pantagruelism] never take in bad part  . . .  whatever they recognize as springing from a good, frank, loyal heart." Here persons are joined to one another through individualizing judgments of their "heart," just as Dr. Rabelais proposes to do in addressing only "well-wishing readers" in the Fourth Book 's prologue.

bas by means of Pantagruel, or rather Rabelais-the-person via Rabelais-author, Alcofribas-narrator, and Pantagruel-putative hero. Then, by adding names designating real persons — Calvin, Postel, DuPuyherbault — Rabelais the author asks readers to step away from these fictional frames toward a world where denunciations could have fatal consequences. The author asks readers, moreover, as his well-wishers to agree with him in denouncing these real persons. But at the same time the author obliges them — the fictive audience of well-wishers for his fiction — to take that step in the company of Pantagruel, a person who exists only by means of a threefold fabrication. The pretense of stepping beyond fiction is thus itself mocked.

One must conclude that it is a fictive being who has exclaimed about an issue existing primarily in the fiction and only secondarily and obliquely beyond it, the abstract and general question of the proliferation of Anti-Nature's children. Such a question has little to do with Pantagruelism, that scorn of particular, real vicissitudes such as Rabelais the person faced. The author's transfer of the angry attack on calumny to Pantagruel's mouth from Dr. Rabelais's (the accusatory epithets in the prologue of 1548 are the very ones repeated here)^[65] filters the anger at the same time as its verbal expression is magnified.^[66]

Far from documenting a complete desertion of earlier faiths, the dark, vindictive representations that may be seen in parts of the Third Book and the incomplete Fourth Book turn out to be forerunners of the more complex and efficacious way of expressing them in the full Fourth Book . Mockery, serving heretofore as a defensive shield, becomes a weapon. Just as there had perhaps always been three voices in the author's head — Pantagruelist-humanist, misanthropic-divisive, and ironic — so also, the author now suggests, must the reader allow all three to operate upon his understanding. Pantagruel and Pantagruelism no longer even pretend to integrate the text with sovereign confidence; yes, society's parts and roles overlap, but they neither balance nicely

[65] See the quotation referred to in ch. 9, n. 17, and the associated discussion.

[66] For those reading Rabelais's text with Plato's Symposium in mind (see ch. 3, n. 39), the anger is also filtered by its contrast to Aristophanes' gaily naturalistic encomium of these spherical beings, the original form of humanity. That is why Rabelais's signal to his readers to consider the ancient sources of Pantagruel's discourse is pertinent. While readerly awareness of Calcagnini's moralistic fable augments the disruptive character of Pantagruel's tale, the presence of the Platonic subtext draws Pantagruel's eruption back toward the wider comic tenor of the episode.

nor laughingly agree. You and I, author and reader, find ourselves ridiculously, ironically near and far from each other and from the life we would like to dominate but cannot. The best we can do is to try and trick it into compliance with our immoderate desires and moderate estate.

In the seventeenth and the eighteenth century critics, far from worrying about the difference between forms of authorial and readerly representation, let alone about the relation of ironic to other kinds of understanding demanded by the text, became obsessed with clearing away narratological illusions in order to get at the actual allusions Rabelais was thought to have concealed for reasons of political safety. The Elzevier editors added a four-page key identifying Gargantua and Gargamelle and Pantagruel and the other characters as kings and queens and other contemporary personages, Ferocious Island as the Touraine country, and so on. Jean Bernard, who in 1741 reedited in augmented form Le Duchat's edition of 1711, reproached his predecessor for not having treated in sufficient detail the contemporary references hidden in Rabelais's text, allusions that made of his work an "imagedevinette."^[67]

One reason for this obsession was, as we suggested, the disappearance of Rabelais's contexts. But why did people seek to remedy this disappearance in such a pointillist fashion and why, for such a long time, did all metatextual criticism of Rabelais pursue meaning in this shallowly realistic way? Such uniformity suggests the pervasive, structural influence of that Foucauldian "classical episteme," with its logic of separate partitions, its Cartesian clear distinctions, and its politico-rationalist insistence that everything be recognizable and organized. In this "classical" ambience to read Rabelais's text was no longer a matter of imbibing a bit of Pantagruelism and a bit more of Menippean skepticism, and of lending one's understanding by turns to an ideal of communal relations that joined humanism, roguery, Christianity, and festival in leisurely conversational terms and to descriptions of social relations that set the same factors at sword's points. As scholarship and society, literature and manners, sought with greater and greater efficacy

[67] That is, a set of riddlelike images. Bernard's prefatory remarks are cited in Fraser, Le Duchat, First Editor of Rabelais, 178.

to individuate, organize, and control belief and behavior, it became impossible to read Rabelais's works in crosscutting, complementary ways.

Polished society in the later seventeenth century came to reject Rabelais not simply because his bonhomie came to look like maudlin prattle. Rabelais was full of "filthy corruption."^[68] His phallic vulgarity and scatology, the gaiety with which he depicted violence became unacceptable. Rabelais had to be expurgated, his satire saved but his ill manners put aside. Reactions like these ran parallel to the development of a courtly civil society in which nobles no longer shared the mores of the country folk among whom they had earlier lived and in which bourgeois elites gradually withdrew from the behavior patterns of the workmen who still occupied the ground story of their home-located businesses. As the new society emerged, built on individual enterprise, juridico-moral equality, and the privatized nuclear family, membership in groups became more voluntary, based on interest and belief rather than on birth, occupation, and residence.^[69]

These changes ruined understanding of the communalist assumptions characterizing Rabelais's text. His books idolize a carefree youthful male camaraderie in education, sport, adventure, and love that had its correlatives, although certainly not its realizations, in contemporary society. In later centuries these correlatives largely disappeared, as the orderly supervision of a minutely graded, morally stringent schooling and confessional took hold. Perhaps the difference should be put even more strongly. Family life is kept in the background in these novels, as is work. A polymorphously "perverse" freedom characterizes the life of the male protagonists nearly without interruption from the time Gargantua's nursemaids tie ribbons about his pretty little thing to the end of the Fifth Book,^[70] when it seems likely that Pantagruel and his double Panurge will soon be married. Insofar as Mikhail Bakhtin is correct about the carnivalesque essence of the Rabelaisian text, such carnivalism arises from not only the permanent atmosphere of leisure utopianly assured the Pantagruelians but also their one-sided sexuality and youth-

[68] See La Bruyère's comments, cited near the end of ch. 6.

[69] The best general depiction of this process in France remains Philippe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood (New York, 1962).

[70] The reference is to G , 11, 60–61, which concludes with a castration threat: "'Ha couper!  . . .  coupez vous la chose aux enfants? Il seroyt Monsieur sans queue."'

fulness. After the sixteenth century, as childhood, adolescence, and young male confraternities were increasingly regulated, the behavior associated earlier with this zone of freedom came to seem bizarre, reprehensible, and irrelevant.

The change from communalist to individualistic assumptions about social behavior was not sudden. Individuation and some ethics of individualism — salvation of the individual soul, for example — are already present in the tenth century and in the first, for that matter. But the balance of power between communal and individual modes of living, as publicly recognized norms, shifted decisively toward individualism in the eighteenth century. This had not happened in Europe since the advent of Christianity. The changed balance was ideal as well as practical, for the ideal of individualism was seen more clearly the more that practical means were forged for people to live separate, autonomous existences, and the reverse was equally true. From the eighteenth century onward idea and practice reinforced each other.

Even if communal membership more than individual peculiarity defines character in Rabelais's works, much also speaks for individuality. Panurge is not just the type of the rogue. Unlike the narrator in Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, he is more than a boisterous voice who articulates an expansive social scene with his restless energy. Unlike the author of Lazarillo de Tormes, Rabelais shows not only what is done to the rogue and how he reacts to it but also how Panurge's character shapes action and propels plot, most notably in the Third Book . The growth and changes in character of Pantagruel have particularly engaged critics, to the point of denying nearly all connection between the giant sketched on the model of oral popular tales and the wise Stoic Christian of the Third Book and the Fourth Book .^[71]

Because the Rabelaisian text takes for granted the notion that people's character is a consequence more of the way they behave with others than of their inward wits, it is rather misleading to trace the development and even the growth in character of Rabelais's heroes one by one through the different books of his text. The communal ambience, the framing action of each part of the text, is primary. But within the parameters of this generalization one must note the voice of empathy in Rabelais's work. It is a "characterological" voice, used most con-

[71] This is the thesis of Richard Berrong's Rabelais and Bakhtin . Pantagruel's emergent Stoic Christianity is especially emphasized by Screech in Rabelais .

spicuously to animate Pantagruel, Panurge, and Friar John, making them vivid individuals. This empathetic talent is also what gives horrifying individuality to the portrait of Quaresmeprenant: the devastation he has wreaked (on his own anatomy as well as on Ferocious Island) is shown as the consequence of psychophysical peculiarities developed in correspondence with the demands of socially prescribed customs. However monstrously strange he is, Quaresmeprenant is depicted not only as a personification but also as a person, confronting the conflicting demands of two normative notions of daily life.

Both empathetic, characterological voices and sympathetic, sociable voices play over the text. The individualizing kind of voice supplements the voice that merges, the tavern voice that enfolds itself alcoholically into the group, the shipboard voice and the adventurer's voice that recognize situations not as yours and mine but ours.

What has led commentators toward historicizing or psychologizing realism has probably been less the edges in the text of an individualistic understanding of personality than Rabelais's gift for sharply defined yet many-faceted characterization, a quality as well shown in the portrayal of events as in the description of protagonists. The "Council of Chesil": the yawning procrastination and at the same time the numb-witted arrogance of the Church's attempt to hold back the tides of reform is struck off in a single phrase. Anti-Nature's children, somersaulting through life as if their heads and feet had turned into ball-bearing roller skates; Sausages scampering up trees like squirrels or martens; cook soldiers with names like Hotpot and Sourbacon swarming out of the belly of an iron sow: the images are indelible.