The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (53 page)

In Rabelais’s erudite imagination, drink would attain elaborate proportions. It was on a drought-cursed Friday, Rabelais recounts, that Pantagruel
was born. “His father named him as he did; for
Panta
in Greek is equivalent to all, and
Gruel
in the Hagarene language means thirsty, the inference being that at the hour of the child’s birth, the world was all athirst. Moreover his father in a mood of prophecy foresaw that his son would one day be the Ruler of the Thirsty Ones.” This volume never abandons the leitmotif of drink. When Pantagruel grows up and assumes his throne, his great battle is against the invading Thirsty-People (Dipsodes).

Pantagruel
was an instant sellout. Two printings were quickly disposed of, and it was immediately pirated. The next year he wrote a parody of popular almanacs, which he called
Pantagrueline Prognostications
. Meanwhile the authorities at the city hospital of Lyons appointed him their principal physician with a stipend of forty French pounds a year.

From the popular
Cronicques de Gargantua
, Rabelais had borrowed the device of listing the giants’ precise measurements, the texture and dimensions of their clothing, their food and drink, their urinations and defecations. Rabelais’s astonishing talent for exaggeration expanded everything into a primeval free-flowing narrative—the birth, education, and adventures of the intrepid young Pantagruel, son of Gargantua and his wife, Badebec, daughter of the king of Utopia. We follow his education in Paris, his meeting with his boon companion Panurge, the learned debates at the Sorbonne, and Pantagruel’s victorious military excursion to defend Utopia against the invading Thirsty-ones, including too a trip to the netherworld.

Rabelais then exploited the popularity of his own Pantagruel by spinning off his own Book One on Gargantua, Pantagruel’s father. For these ribald ventures Lyons had the advantage of remoteness from the vigilant eye of the Sorbonne. When the gibes of
Pantagruel
against the Sorbonnists came to their notice in October 1533, they labeled the work obscene but still did not impose the faculty’s formal act of suppression. When King Francis I came to Lyons for the marriage of his second son to Catherine de’ Medici, Rabelais met the energetic young Jean du Bellay, bishop of Paris, who would become his great patron. To relieve his pain from sciatica, du Bellay took along Dr. Rabelais on his trip to Rome. There Rabelais sought, unsuccessfully, to secure the pope’s absolution for having given up his monastic robes and for changing from the Franciscans to the Benedictines without proper authority.

He must have been a prodigious worker. Despite his travels and his enlarged hospital duties, soon after his return to Lyons in 1534 he published the substantial Book One of his great comic novel.
La Vie inestimable du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel
was again signed Maistre Alcofribas (Nasier). While
Pantagruel
had spun out the fantasy of an amiable giant growing up and going forth to battle in Utopia, this tale of his father,
Gargantua
, plunged into troublesome issues of education, politics, warfare,
and the Church. Although Rabelais remained a Catholic all his life, he sometimes came perilously close to the Protestant positions. The controversial Erasmus (1466?–1536) he called his spiritual “father and mother.”

These were turbulent times, fertile of both discovery and creation. When Rabelais was a boy, Columbus was making his first voyages to America. He had just become a Franciscan novice when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of Palast Church in Wittenberg and was putting the Bible into German. This was the birthtime, too, of modern nations and of the French language under Francis I. In neighboring Italy Rabelais saw the recent works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian.

Learned men across Europe were finally reading their classics in the original Greek. In such an age it still took courage to expose the absurdity of the learned. What might have been Rabelais’s fate was dramatized in the tragedy of his friend Étienne Dolet (1509–1546), “the first martyr of the Renaissance.” Dolet had set up a maverick printing press in Lyons, and after Rabelais’s own expurgated edition of
Gargantua
and
Pantagruel
, which softened his strictures against the Sorbonne, Dolet brought out his “new edition” of Rabelais, reproducing all Rabelais’s original indiscretions. The Sorbonne banned both editions. Dolet urged his countrymen to write in French, their mother tongue, rather than in Latin, “so that foreigners won’t call us barbarians.” His courage left many in doubt whether he was an atheist or merely a Protestant, but the Sorbonne was not interested in fine distinctions. They condemned Dolet for the heresy of denying the immortality of the soul. On his way to be burned alive at the stake, he punned, “Non dolet ipse Dolet, sed pro ratione dolet.” (Dolet does not suffer for himself, but he suffers for the sake of reason).

Rabelais was fortunate in his patrons—Abbot Geoffroy d’Estissac of the Benedictine monastery that he first joined in refuge from the Franciscans; Cardinal Jean du Bellay, who took him along on trips to Rome; and then Jean’s elder brother Guillaume Seigneur de Langey, who supported him for several years in Turin. With their aid he finally did secure the pope’s absolution for abandoning the monastic garb and changing orders. In the vacillating orthodoxies of the age, Rabelais himself played an ambiguous role between compassion for Evangelicals and Protestants and conformity to the latest Roman dogma. But he somehow retained the support of Francis I. In 1551 Jean du Bellay secured for him paid positions as curate of two churches and in accordance with the customs that he lampooned, he never lived in either place, but “farmed out” these benefices and spent his own last years in Paris.

While Rabelais made every institution and article of faith the target of his extravagant imagination, his most enduring fantasies were oblique in their
comic attack. The narrative flow of his
Gargantua
, Book One of his romance (written and published after
Pantagruel
which he called Book Two), is straightforward. He begins conventionally enough, with the birth and youth of Gargantua, his education at home and in Paris, where Gargantua experiences both an old-fashioned scholastic education by Tubal Holofernes and an enlightened humanistic education by Ponocrates. The Cake Peddlers’ War shows how petty quarrels lead to mayhem and murder.

There was more to come, but only after a long interval. It was not until 1546, twelve years after
Gargantua
, that Rabelais’s Book Three appeared. But it was his first two volumes, the
Gargantua
(1534) and the
Pantagruel
(1532), that would become classics of Western literature. These provided a single novel of romance in the style of those that in the next century would disorder the imagination of Don Quixote and incite Cervantes’s own anti-romance.

There is more in the marrow of these books, Rabelais explained, than readers might expect. “Following the dog’s example, you will have to be wise in sniffing, smelling, and estimating these fine and meaty books, swiftness in the chase and boldness in the attack are what is called for; after which, by careful reading and frequent meditation, you should break the bone and suck the substantific marrow … in the certain hope that you will be rendered prudent and valorous by such a reading.” The title pages of both volumes bore the anagram Maistre Alcofribas (Nasier), “Abstractor of Quintessence.”

But footnotes are seldom required for Gargantua’s young life. “This infant did not, as soon as he was born, begin to cry ‘Mie, mie’ like other children; but in a loud voice, he bawled ‘Give me a drink! a drink! a drink!’ as though he were inviting the whole world to have a drink with him, and so lustily that he was heard through the land of Booze and Bibbers.” Gargantua’s codpiece, the flap in the front of his trousers, took sixteen and a quarter ells of cloth “in the form of a buttress, securely and jovially fastened with a pair of pretty gold buckles” and two enameled hooks each enchased with a huge emerald the size of an orange. “For (as Orpheus says,
lib. De Lapidibus
, and Pliny,
lib. ult
.) this stone has an erective virtue and one very comforting to the natural member. The bulge of the codpiece was nearly six feet long.”

Gargantua so impresses his father, Grandgousier, when, as a boy, he invents an ingenious Rump-Wiper that Grandgousier gives the boy a proper education and one day has him made a Doctor of Jovial Science. When Gargantua arrives in Paris to be educated at the university, he finds the people “so stupid, such ninnies, and so foolish by nature that a juggler, a pardon-peddler, or relict-seller, a mule with bells, or a fiddler in the middle of a public square will gather a bigger crowd than a good evangelic preacher ever could.” To escape the gaping crowd Gargantua takes refuge in the
towers of Notre-Dame. From there he proclaims in a loud voice, “I suppose these rascals expect me to pay my own welcome and
proficiat
, do they? That’s fair enough. I’m going to give them a vintage
par rys
—of a kind to make you laugh.” Then he unbuttons his handsome codpiece and “he drenched them with such a bitter deluge of urine that he thereby drowned two-hundred-sixty-thousand-four-hundred-eighteen, not counting the women and little children. A certain number escaped this doughty pisser by lightness of foot; and these, when they had reached a point above the University, sweating, coughing, spitting, and out of breath, all began cursing and swearing, some in wrath while others were laughing fit to burst.…” These people, “done for from laughing,” decided to name their city Paris (from
par rys
, “laughing”). “Up to that time it had been called Leutitia, as Strabo tells us,
lib. iii
, that is to say,
White
in Greek, on account of the white rumps of the ladies there.” Attracted by the melodious bells in the towers of Notre-Dame, Gargantua takes them as jingle bells for the neck of the mare he is sending back to his father loaded with Brie cheese and fresh herring.

In Paris he suffers the scholastic discipline of the great doctor, Tubal Holofernes, who, after five years and three months, teaches him to recite his letters backward and to write the Gothic script so he can copy numerous books, “for the art of printing was not yet practised.” Then he spends more than ten years and eleven months on the standard Latin grammar “with the commentaries of Bang-breeze, Scallywag, Claptrap, Gualehaul, John the Calf, Copper-coin, Flowery-tongue, and a number of others,” which he recited in reverse order to prove to his mother that grammar was no science at all. His next tutor, Ponocrates, follows the humanistic mode of education, introduces him to learned men of lively minds, directs his interests to nature, while inducting him into the mathematical sciences, geometry, astronomy, and music and encouraging him to hunt and swim to keep fit—so that now he does not lose a single hour of the day. Meanwhile Gargantua has learned to play 217 different games (all listed), some of Rabelais’s own invention.

In a sudden change of scene we are plunged into the Cake Peddlers’ War. As the cake peddlers of Lerne pass along the highway they are approached by shepherds who simply want to buy their cakes. But the cake peddlers turn on them, calling them “scum of the earth, toothless bastards, redheaded rogues, chippy-chasers, filthy wretches of the kind that dung in the bed, big lubbers, sneaky curs, lazy hounds, pretty boys, pot-bellies, windjammers, good-for-nothings, clodhoppers, bad customers, greedy beggars, blowhards, mamma’s darlings, monkey-faces, loafers, bums, big boobs, scoundrels, simpletons, silly jokers, dudes, teeth-chattering gramps, dirty cowherds, and dung-dripping shepherds” who ought to be satisfied with coarse lumpy bread and big round loaves.

This occasions a grand melee, out of which grows a murderous war. The
episode caricatures the interminable quarrel of Rabelais’s own lawyer father with neighbors over the fishing rights in a stream. Here Rabelais introduces one of his most attractive inventions, the good-natured monk Frère Jean, whose deeds of valor defend the local shepherds against the aggressive King Picrochole of the Cake Peddlers. Gargantua finally rewards Frère Jean by building him a new kind of monastery (or anti-monastery), the proverbial Abbey of Thélème, ruled by the motto “Do what you will.” Inhabited only by handsome men and women richly “dressed according to their own fancy,” it becomes an epicure’s utopia. Members of the order speak a half-dozen languages, play musical instruments, and write verses to one another—the girls by the age of ten, the boys by twelve.

Pantagruel’s adventures in Book Two, written sometime before Book One, are disjointed and delightfully random. Pantagruel’s youth, like that of his father, is filled by noble deeds. In Paris for his education he meets his lifelong companion Panurge. Gargantua pleads for Renaissance learning in a letter to his son. And Pantagruel shrewdly settles a legal quibble between Lord Kissarse and Monsieur Suckpoop by theological hairsplitting debated in sign-language. Then Pantagruel and Panurge are off to the war in Utopia, which was being laid waste by the Dipsodes. When their friend Epistemon is decapitated, Panurge holds the head against his codpiece, “to keep it warm, as well as to keep it out of the draught.” Then with fifteen or sixteen stitches he reattaches Epistemon’s head. “Epistemon was healed, and very cleverly, too, except that he was hoarse for more than three weeks afterward, and had a hacking cough, which he could only get rid of by drinking a lot.” Meanwhile, Epistemon has been dead long enough to have some wonderful adventures in hell and the Elysian Fields. There Alexander the Great earns a miserable living patching old shoes, and Xerxes hawks mustard. “All the Knights of the Round Table were poor day-laborers, plying an oar on the rivers Cocytus, Phlegethon, Styx, Acheron, and Lethe.… But for each fare, all they get is a punch in the nose, and at night, a little piece of moldy bread.” Needless to say, Pantagruel and Panurge win the war.

When we read Rabelais in translation, we are grasping for his wit through a veil. Rabelais’s book was an act of faith in a language he was beginning to make literary. Chateaubriand would say that Rabelais “created French literature.” His respected medical works he had written in Latin, but he chose to write his novel in French. Spoken literature and the arts of memory were still only partly displaced by the printed word. Francis I, Rabelais himself reported, had Rabelais’s book read aloud to him. Not till 1539 did French become the language of the law courts. Calvin translated his own
Institutes of the Christian Religion
from Latin into French in 1541. When Joachim du Bellay wrote the manifesto of the new French literature, his
Defence and Illustration of the French Language
(1549), Rabelais was one of the few French men of learning who had dared write books in the language of the marketplace.