French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (6 page)

Rabelais's mysterious giants

Two of the world's most memorable giants appear in the books of
the physician Francois Rabelais (c. 1490-1553), who also gave the
world two important adjectives: Gargantuan and Pantagruelian.
Rabelais did not invent the two giants Gargantua and Pantagruel
- they existed already, as witnessed by an anonymous chapbook of
tales that appeared in 1532 under the title Gargantua: Les grandes
et inestimables cronicques du grand et enorme geant Gargantua
- but he turned them into important characters in the literary
pantheon, in a series of books published from 1532 to 1552, the
first under the anagrammatic pseudonym Alcofrybas Nasier.
Successively a Franciscan and then a Benedictine monk, before
becoming a physician and making at least three trips to Italy,
Rabelais was associated with reformist movements within the
Catholic Church and was keenly interested in the new humanist
learning and its implications for education and for religion.

The prologue to Gargantua sets forth the idea that the book
contains secret wisdom and urges readers to suck out the
`substance in the marrow' (la sustantfcque mouelle). This
metaphor of a hidden core is preceded by such sayings as `the
habit does not make the monk' for `one may be dressed in
monastic garb who, inside, is quite other than a monk'. Are
Rabelais's books coded messages addressed to Evangelical
Christian sympathizers who were deeply sceptical of the Catholic
theologians of the universities and of the monastic orders? Are
they, on the contrary, the opinions of a rationalistic atheist? Or is
the claim to convey a hidden message simply an additional joke
accompanying the openly comic material? The debate still rages,
but it is clear that for all the carnivalesque goings-on (for instance, Garguantua, arriving in Paris, relieves himself and drowns several
hundred thousand Parisians) there are major questions about
social institutions raised in the midst of the drinking, urinating,
and brawling. The discontinuous, episodic nature of each book
in the series thrusts the main characters to the foreground as the
major structural elements. Pantagruel is the hero of the first book, and then his father Gargantua becomes the hero in the second
book (a flashback, or `prequel', to the first), while Pantagruel's
companion Panurge is the focus of the third book - Panurge
wishes to marry but fears being cuckolded and tries a variety of
ways to predict his fate in marriage.

2. Illustration by Gustave Dore (1854) for Rabelais's Gargantua (1534)

As we look backwards from our modern vantage point towards
Rabelais's heroes, it is striking to note the quite relaxed integration
of popular and learned cultures, of grossly physical with highly
erudite and spiritual questions - the eating and drinking in
Gargantua is explicitly connected with Plato's Symposium.
Although some works of the following century strive to maintain
this mix of character, subject, and tone (for example, Charles
Sorel's Histoire comique de Francion, 1623-33, quite clearly
inspired by Rabelais), for the most part the enormous physicality
and appetite of Gargantua and Pantagruel and their humour are
absent from the high-culture novels, comedies, and tragedies of
the 17th century. In terms of the century-long effort to assimilate
the humanistic culture of antiquity into a French, as opposed to an
Italian or Italianate, model, Rabelais clearly succeeded in giving
the French hugely learned and subtle protagonists deeply rooted
in French geography, customs, and language.

The French sonnet

The lure of Italian sophistication and the countervailing pull
backwards towards French simplicity appear as themes in
Renaissance lyric, particularly in such works as Joachim du
Bellay's The Regrets (1558), in which the first-person poetcharacter compares life in Rome to his memories of home. Du
Bellay's importance for shaping modern French literature goes
beyond his many successes in lyric, for he was also the author
of the manifesto of his innovative poetic group, the Pleiade,
a group of seven poets formed in the late 1540s that included
Pierre de Ronsard. This manifesto, the Defense and Illustration
of the French Language (la Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise,1649) argued for enriching the vocabulary of French
and building its cultural repertory to make it equal to Italian and
the languages of antiquity. The Defense appeared ten years after
the royal ordinance of Villers-Cotterets by which Francois I made
the vernacular the language of official documents (replacing
Latin). Thus the Defense furthers the promotion of French
linguistic nationalism that the King had begun, and it also assigns
to the professional poet a role that is not limited to singing the
praises of kings and military heroes. Not only does the Defense
make it clear that poetry - in the broad sense, not only lyric, but
also epic, comedy, and tragedy - is a discipline, rather than a
sudden inspiration or simply the result of a certain temperament,
but also that the poet's work as word-maker and language-builder
assigns to him a broad and varied cultural mandate. Du Bellay
proposed various ways of creating and importing words into
French, but he particularly promoted the idea - the doctrine of
imitation - that French writers should make literary equivalents
of ancient works rather than simple translations. In other words,
that France should have French epics, French lyrics, and so
forth, rather than simply import the works of others. Du Bellay's
polemical work serves as a document of the serious ambitions
of poets in the period, but today we may also see it as an early
expression of France's struggle to maintain its own identity in
the face of whatever other culture is the dominant global model,
whether it be that of Renaissance Rome or of today's Hollywood.

Following such models as Ovid, Horace, and Catullus, each of
the major writers in verse shaped for himself or herself a distinct
character or persona in the ballads, rondeaux, poetic epistles,
elegies, epitaphs, blazons (verse descriptions, particularly of parts
of the female body), complaints, epigrams, and odes that appeared
abundantly in the 16th century. Many of the most important
works took the form of long sequences of ten-verse (the dizain)
or fourteen-verse (the sonnet) units. The dizain is the unit that
Maurice Sceve, one of the poets of Lyon (who include also Pernette
du Guillet and `Louise Labe'- the latter may in fact be simply a fictitious identity under which a collective of male poets published
their works), used for his long hermetic love poem, Delie, object
de plus haulte vertu (Delie, object of the highest virtue, 1544), a
sequence of 449 dizains. The sonnet, on the other hand, has had
more durable success, and the form itself testifies to the impact of
Italian literature. Clement Marot, the first great poet of the 16th
century, like Rabelais a protege of Marguerite de Navarre, brought
the Petrarchan sonnet to France in the 1530s.

It was in the 1550s, though, that the sonnet triumphed in the
works of the Pleiade poets, each of whom gives a different tonality
to the form in connection with the different persona the poet
wished to create. Pierre Ronsard, for instance, variously portrays
the character `Ronsard' as suffering horribly from love or as the
triumphant poet whose transcendent verbal gifts will be able
to confer immortality upon the woman who grants her favours.
Take, for instance, the well-known sonnet from the Second Book of
Sonnets for Helene that begins:

[When you will be very old, during candle-lit evenings, / Sitting next
to the fire, carding and spinning, / You will say, singing my verses
with amazement, / `Ronsard sang my praises when I was beautiful'.]

The poet cleverly inserts himself into the text, not by presenting
himself here in the first person but rather by having a character
speak about him as if he were a prodigy. `Ronsard' becomes a
character for retrospective admiration in this text which is a
variation on the ancient carpe diem. As the `Prince of Poets',
Ronsard was not shy about celebrating his own talent, and,
implicitly, the supreme position of the poet in society. In his
`Response to Insults and Calumnies', he wrote of his success in reviving ancient poetry and asserts to his detractors, `You cannot
deny it, since from my plenitude / You are all filled, I am the centre
of your study, / You have all come from the grandeur of me' (Tu ne
le peux nier, car de ma plenitude / Vous estes tous remplis, je suis
seul vostre estude, / Vous estes tous yssus de la grandeur de moy).

An exemplary sonnet-sequence:
du Bel lay's The Regrets

Let us return to Ronsard's companion du Bellay, whose The
Regrets, often considered his greatest work, is particularly useful
for capturing the emulation, enthusiasm, and anxiety that French
writers felt when facing the more advanced culture of Italy. The
poet, as first-person character of his own disillusioning adventures
in the capital of Roman antiquity, highlights national and
linguistic identity, promoting the idea of a humble, frank-speaking
native son of the Loire valley adrift in the pomp and decadence of
the papal court. But The Regrets is also a book that advances the
idea of a poetry based on accidental encounter - `Following the
various incidents of this place, / Whether they are good or bad, I
write at random' (Mais, suivant de ce lieu les accidents divers, /
Soit de bien, soit de mal, j escris a l'adventure). While this claim is
literally unsustainable in the context of a sequence written in the
dauntingly artful and constraining form of the sonnet, it situates
the poetic `I' as a humble observer of the contemporary world.
This is a poetic persona that, even if it is somewhat rooted in
Villon and Rutebeuf, gains momentum much later in the French
tradition, with Baudelaire and the Surrealists, and even appears
to prefigure James Joyce, insofar as du Bellay, while exploring the
city, tries on a comparison to ancient poets and epic heroes, most
strikingly Ulysses.

The Regrets are an open-ended, varied work with multiple tones -
satiric, elegiac, conversational, descriptive, and at times stirringly
celebratory ('France, mother of arts, of arms, and of laws', France,
mere des arts, des armes et des lois - a striking reversal of his nation's relation to Rome). Its most direct successor in modern
French literature may be Baudelaire's post-Romantic Fleurs du
mal. It was only a few years after The Regrets that the wars of
religion between varying factions of Protestants and Catholics
(1562-98) profoundly changed French culture and set the stage
for the more highly structured and often less personal literature of
the 17th century.