Mimesis (47 page)

(Then, as well as I could, I got upon it, and went along full two leagues upon his tongue, and so long marched, that at last I came into his mouth. But, oh gods and goddesses, what did I see there! Jupiter confound me with his trisulk lightning if I lie! I walked there as they do in Sophie, at Constantinople, and saw there great rocks, like the mountains in Denmark—I believe that those were his teeth. I saw also fair meadows, large forests, great and strong cities, not a jot less than Lyons or Poictiers. The first person I met there was a man planting cabbages, whereat being very much amazed, I asked him, My friend, what dost thou make here? I plant cabbages, said he. But how, and wherewith, said I? Ha, Sir, said he, everyone cannot have his ballocks as heavy as a mortar, neither can we be all rich. Thus do I get my living, and carry them to the market to sell in the city which is here behind. Jesus! said I, is there here a new world? Sure, said he, it is never a jot new, but it is commonly reported, that, without this, there is a new earth, whereof the inhabitants enjoy the light of a sun and moon, and that it is full of very good commodities; but yet this is more ancient than that. Yea, but, said I, what is the name of that city, whither thou carriest thy cabbages to sell? It is called Aspharage, said he, and all the in-dwellers are Christians, very honest men, and will make you good cheer. To be brief, I resolved to go thither. Now, in my way, I met with a fellow that was lying in wait to catch pigeons, of whom I asked, My friend, from whence come
these pigeons? Sir, said he, they come from the other world. Then I thought, that, when Pantagruel yawned, the pigeons went into his mouth in whole flocks, thinking that it had been a pigeon-house.

Then I went into the city, which I found fair, very strong, and seated in a good air; but at my entry the guard demanded of me my pass or ticket. Whereat I was much astonished, and asked them, My masters, is there any danger of the plague here? O Lord, said they, they die hard by here so fast, that the cart runs about the streets. Good God, said I, and where? Whereunto they answered, that it was in Larynx and Pharynx, which are two great cities, such as Rouen and Nantes, rich and of great trading. And the cause of the plague was by a stinking and infectious exhalation, which lately vapoured out of the depths of the wells, whereof there have died above two and twenty hundred and threescore thousand and sixteen persons within this seven-night. Then I considered, calculated, and found, that it was an unsavoury breathing, which came out of Pantagruel’s stomach, when he did eat so much garlic, as we have aforesaid.

Parting from thence, I passed amongst the rocks, which were his teeth, and never left walking, till I got up on one of them; and there I found the pleasantest places in the world, great large tennis courts, fair galleries, sweet meadows, store of vines, and an infinite number of banqueting summer outhouses in the fields, after the Italian fashion, full of pleasure and delight, where I stayed full four months, and never made better cheer in my life as then. After that I went down by the hinder teeth to come to the chaps. But in the way I was robbed by thieves in a great forest, that is in the territory towards the ears. Then, going on downward, I fell upon a pretty petty village—truly I have forgot the name of it—where I was yet merrier than ever, and got some certain money to live by. Can you tell how? By sleeping. For there they hire men by the day to sleep, and they get by it fivepence or sixpence a day, but they that can snore hard get at least ninepence. How I had been robbed in the valley, I informed the senators, who told me, that, in very truth, the people of that side were bad livers, and naturally thievish, whereby I perceived well, that as we have with us countries be-hither and beyond the mountains, so have they there countries be-hither and beyond the teeth. But it is far better living on this side, and the air is purer. There I began to think,
that it is very true, which is commonly said, that one half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth; seeing none before myself had ever written of that country, wherein are above five and twenty kingdoms inhabited, besides deserts, and a great arm of the sea. Concerning which, I have composed a great book intituled The History of the Gorgians, for so I have named them because they dwell in the gorge of my master Pantagruel.

At last I was willing to return, and, passing by his beard, I cast myself upon his shoulders, and from thence slid down to the ground, and fell before him. As soon as I was perceived by him, he asked me, Whence comest thou, Alcofrybas? I answered him, Out of your mouth, my lord! And how long hast thou been there? said he. Since the time, said I, that you went against the Almyrodes. That is more than six months ago, said he. And wherewith didst thou live? What didst thou drink? I answered, My lord, of the same that you did, and of the daintiest morsels that passed through your throat I took toll. Yea, but, said he, where didst thou shite? In your throat, my lord, said I. Ha, ha, thou art a merry fellow, said he. We have with the help of God conquered all the land of the Dipsodes; I will give thee the Lairdship of Salmigondin. Grammercy, my lord, said I, you gratify me beyond all that I have deserved of you.) After Urquhart’s translation.
Gargantua and Pantagruel
. Translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter le Motteux. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1929.

Rabelais did not himself invent the theme of this comic adventure. In the chapbook of the Giant Gargantua (I use a reprint of a copy preserved in Dresden, from W. Weigand’s edition of Regis’ translation of Rabelais, 3rd ed., Berlin, 1923, Vol. 2, pp. 398ff.: cf. also note 7 in Abel Lefranc’s critical edition, 4, 330), we are told how the 2,943 armed men who were to strangle Gargantua in his sleep wandered into his open mouth, mistaking the teeth for great cliffs, and how later, when he quenched his thirst after sleeping, all but three of them were drowned, the three saving themselves in a hollow tooth. In a later passage of the chapbook, Gargantua gives fifty prisoners temporary quarters in a hollow tooth; they even find an indoor tennis court there, a
jeu de paume
, to keep them amused. (Rabelais uses the hollow tooth in another passage, book 1, chapter 38, where Gargantua swallows six pilgrims and a head of lettuce.) Aside from these French sources, Rabelais has in mind, in connection with our passage,
an antique author whom he highly esteemed, Lucian, who in his
True History
(1, 30ff.) tells of a sea monster which swallows a ship with all its crew; in its maw they find woods, mountains, and lakes, in which live various half-animal creatures as well as two human beings, father and son, who had been swallowed twenty-seven years earlier after a shipwreck; they too plant cabbages and have built a shrine to Poseidon. Rabelais, in his way, has combined these two prototypes, taking from the chapbook the giant’s mouth, which despite its immense dimensions, has not entirely lost the characteristics of a mouth, and placing within it Lucian’s picture of a landscape and a society. Indeed, he goes even further than Lucian (twenty-five kingdoms with large cities, whereas in Lucian it is only a matter of some thousand fabulous beings). But he is at little pains to reconcile the two themes: the presumable size of a mouth so densely populated bears no relation to the speed of the return journey; still less the fact that, after Alcofrybas gets back, the giant notices him and speaks to him; and least of all does the information Alcofrybas gives concerning his diet and defecations during his stay inside the mouth correspond with the highly developed agricultural and domestic life which he found there—whether he has simply forgotten it or is deliberately not mentioning it. Apparently the conversation with the giant, which closes the scene, serves no purpose but that of giving a comical characterization of the kind-hearted Pantagruel, who shows a lively interest in the bodily welfare of his friend, particularly in his being supplied with plenty of good drink, and who good-humoredly rewards his undaunted admission concerning his defecations with the gift of a chatelleny—although our honest Alcofrybas had, so to speak, found himself a cushy job for the duration of the war. The way in which the recipient of the gift expresses his thanks (“I have done nothing to deserve it”) is in this case no mere form of speech but suits the circumstances perfectly.

Despite his recollections of literary prototypes, Rabelais has gone entirely his own way in constructing the world inside the giant’s mouth. Alcofrybas finds no fabulous half-animal beings, no little handful of men painfully adapting themselves to their surroundings, but a fully developed society and economy, in which everything goes on just as it does at home in France. At first he is astonished that human beings live there at all; yet what surprises him most is that things are not somehow strange and different, but just like things in the world he knows. This begins with his very first encounter: he is not as
amazed to find a man here (he has already seen the cities from a distance) as he is to find him quietly planting cabbages, as if they were both in Touraine. So he asks him,
tout esbahy
: Friend, what are you doing here? and receives a complacent, tongue-in-cheek answer such as he might well have got from a Tourangeau peasant, of the type which many of Rabelais’ characters often represent themselves to be:
Je plante, dist-il, des choulx
.

It reminds me of a small boy’s remark which I once overheard; he was using the telephone for the first time, so that his grandmother, who lived in another town, could hear his voice; asked, “And what are you doing, lad?” he answered, proudly and factually, “I’m telephoning.” Here the case is slightly different: the peasant is not only naive and limited, he also has the rather reserved humor which is extremely French and particularly characteristic of Rabelais. He has a very good notion that the stranger is from that other world of which he has heard rumors; but he pretends to notice nothing, and answers the second question, which is also purely an exclamation of astonishment (approximately: But why? How come?), as naively as he had the first, with a juicy peasant figure of speech which signifies that he is not rich; he earns his living from his cabbages, which he sells in the neighboring city. Now at last the visitor begins to grasp the situation: Jesus, he exclaims, this is an entirely new world! No, it is not new, says the peasant, but people say there’s a new land out there where they have a sun and moon and all sorts of fine things; but this land here is older.

The fellow talks of the “new world” as people in Touraine or anywhere in Western or Central Europe might have spoken of the then newly discovered lands, of America or India; but he is cunning enough to suspect that the stranger is an inhabitant of that other world, for he reassures him as to the people in the city: They are good Christians and will not treat you badly; assuming, and in this case he is right, that the designation “good Christians” will serve as a reassuring guarantee for the stranger too. In short, this inhabitant of the outskirts of Aspharage behaves just as his congener in Touraine would have done. So things go on, frequently interrupted by grotesque explanations, which likewise maintain no sort of proportion; for when Pantagruel opens his mouth, which contains so many kingdoms and cities, the dimensions of the opening ought not to be easily confused with a pigeon-house. But the theme “everything just as at home” persists unchanged. At the city gate, Alcofrybas is asked for his health certificate, because the plague is rampant in the great cities of the land;
this is a reference to the pestilence which raged in the cities of northern France during the years 1532 and 1533 (cf. A. Lefranc’s Introduction to his critical edition, p. xxxi). The fine mountain landscape of the teeth is a picture of the Western European agricultural countryside, and the country houses are built in the Italian style, which was beginning to become the fashion in France too at that period. In the village where Alcofrybas passes the last days of his stay in Pantagruel’s mouth, the situation, except for the grotesque method of earning money by sleeping, at five to six sous per diem, with an extra bonus for strong snorers (a recollection of the traditional Land of Cockaigne), is thoroughly European: When the senators condole with him for having been robbed on his way through the mountain forest, they give him to understand that the people “over yonder” are uncultured barbarians who do not know how to live. And he infers that in Pantagruel’s maw there are countries on this side and on the other side of the teeth, as at home there are countries on this side and the other side of the mountains.

Whereas Lucian produces what is in all essentials a fantasy of travel and adventure, and the chapbook puts all the emphasis on the grotesqueness of enlarged dimensions, Rabelais maintains a constant interplay of different locales, different themes, and different levels of style. While Alcofrybas, the Abstractor of Quintessences, is making his journey of discovery through Pantagruel’s mouth, Pantagruel and his army continue the war against the Almyrodes and Dipsodes; and in the journey of discovery itself, at least three different categories of experience alternate and intermingle. The frame is provided by the grotesque theme of gigantic dimensions, which is never for a moment left out of sight and is constantly recalled by ever new and absurd comic conceits; by the pigeons that fly into the giant’s mouth when he yawns, by the explanation of the plague as the result of Pantagruel’s eating garlic and the poisonous vapors which rise from his stomach afterward, by the transformation of the teeth into a mountain landscape, by the manner of the return journey, and by the closing conversation. Meanwhile there is developed an entirely different, entirely new, and, at the period, extremely current theme—the theme of the discovery of a new world, with all the astonishment, the widening horizons and change in the world picture, which follow upon such a discovery.

This is one of the great motifs of the Renaissance and of the two following centuries, one of the themes which served as levers toward
political, religious, economic, and philosophical revolution. It constantly reappears—whether writers place an action in that still new and half-unknown world, because there they can construct a purer and more primitive milieu than the European, a device which provides an effective and at the same time a piquantly surreptitious method of criticizing things at home; or whether they introduce an inhabitant of those strange lands into the European world and let their criticism of the established order in Europe arise out of his naive astonishment and his general reaction to what he sees. In either case the theme has a revolutionary force which shakes the established order, sets it in a broader context, and thus makes it a relative thing. In our passage, Rabelais only lets the theme begin to sound, he does not develop it. Alcofrybas’ astonishment when he sees the first inhabitant of the mouth belongs in this category of experiences, as does, above all, the reflection he makes at the end of his journey—Then it became clear to me how right people are when they say: One half the world does not know how the other half lives. Rabelais immediately buries the theme under grotesque jokes, so that in the episode as a whole it is not dominant. But we must not forget that Rabelais first called the country of his giants Utopia, a name which he borrowed from Thomas More’s book, which had appeared sixteen years earlier, and that More—to whom, of all his contemporaries, Rabelais perhaps owed the most—was one of the first to use the theme of a distant country, in the reformistic manner described above, as an example. It is not only the name: the country of Gargantua and Pantagruel, with its political, religious, and educational forms, is not only called, it is Utopia; a distant, still hardly discovered land, lying, like More’s Utopia, somewhere in the East, although to be sure it sometimes seems that it can be found in the heart of France. We shall return to this.