Gargantua and Pantagruel

Overview

Five books, published over more than thirty years, and not in the order they are read. Pantagruel came first, in 1532, under the anagram pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier. Gargantua, about the father, followed in 1534 and is placed first in modern editions. The Third Book appeared in 1546, the Fourth in 1552, and the Fifth in 1564, eleven years after Rabelais died, with its authorship still disputed. The Great Books set prints the first four.

Francois Rabelais was a Franciscan friar whose Greek books were confiscated by his order, then a Benedictine, then a secular priest, then a physician, lecturing on Galen from the Greek text and performing public dissections at a time when that was novel. He had protectors at the top of the French church and needed them: the Sorbonne’s faculty of theology condemned each book as it appeared, and men were burned in Paris in those years for less.

About a thousand pages. It is hard, and the difficulty is not the prose but the reference. The jokes assume scholastic logic, canon law, Galenic medicine, monastic practice, Erasmus, the Bible in Greek, and the politics of 1530s France. Screech’s translation exists to solve this and the notes are essential.

The structure is loose to the point of absent. Episodes accumulate, digressions swallow chapters, and there are catalogues, of games, of books in a library, of ways of wiping oneself, of adjectives, that run for pages and are meant to.

What happens

Gargantua. The giant is born from his mother’s ear after she eats too much tripe, and his first word is a demand for drink. His childhood is a survey of the body’s appetites, and a famous chapter in which the boy explains to his father, at length and with a conclusion, his experimental research into the best object for cleaning himself after defecating. The answer involves a goose.

His first education is scholastic. He is taught by masters with names like Holofernes and Jobelin Bride, spends years on grammatical treatises, learns to recite them backwards, grows fat, sleepy and stupid, and takes fifty-eight years to accomplish nothing. His father, hearing a page of twelve speak more sensibly than his son, understands what has been done to him.

The replacement is Ponocrates, and the programme is the humanist ideal in detail. The day begins before dawn with scripture, continues through Greek and Latin authors, astronomy, arithmetic, music, and horsemanship, with physical training, swimming and weapons, and conversation at meals about what is being eaten and where it comes from. Even the time on the lavatory is used. Once a month they go to the country and get pleasantly drunk. The point is that nothing is wasted and nothing is denied.

Then the Picrocholine war, which starts when the cake-bakers of Lerne insult some shepherds over a purchase. Picrochole invades. His counsellors, in one of the best scenes Rabelais wrote, talk him through the conquest of the entire known world while the war is still an argument about cakes, and he asks anxiously what they shall drink in the desert. Grandgousier writes letters offering restitution and is ignored.

The war is won largely by Friar John of the Hashes, a monk who defends his abbey’s vineyard with the staff of the cross and kills thirteen thousand men, and who is everything a monk is not supposed to be: physically formidable, cheerful, blasphemous, useful.

As his reward he is given the Abbey of Theleme, built to be the opposite of a monastery. Beautiful architecture, no walls, no clocks, men and women together, everyone good-looking, well born and educated, free to leave and to marry, and a single rule: do what you will. Rabelais argues that people of good birth and education have a natural instinct toward virtue, and that constraint is what perverts it. Whether this is his real position or a utopian fantasy he knows to be one is a standing question.

Pantagruel. The son’s story, written first, and rougher. His birth kills his mother. At university he meets Panurge, starving, addressing him in thirteen languages including three invented ones before finally using French, and Panurge takes over the book. He is a trickster, a thief, a coward, and inexhaustibly inventive, and his account of how he escaped from the Turks by having himself roasted is a set piece.

The book contains the Limousin student, who speaks a ludicrous Latinised French until Pantagruel seizes him by the throat, whereupon he reverts to broad dialect and begs for mercy. It contains the lawsuit between Lords Kissarse and Suckfist, argued in perfect legal form and complete nonsense, and decided by a judgement of the same kind, to everyone’s satisfaction. It contains the library of Saint Victor, a catalogue of invented titles mocking scholastic theology.

And it contains Gargantua’s letter to his son, which is not a joke at all. It celebrates the restoration of learning, the availability of printed books, the recovery of Greek and Hebrew, and instructs him to master everything, and then closes with a warning that knowledge without conscience is the ruin of the soul.

The Third Book. A change. Panurge wants to marry and is afraid of being cuckolded, and the entire book is his consultation of authorities: dice, Virgilian lots, dreams, a sibyl, a deaf-mute, a dying poet, a theologian, a doctor, a philosopher, a lawyer, and finally Triboulet the fool. Every one of them gives an answer that can be read both ways, and Panurge interprets each in his own favour.

It is a sustained joke about the impossibility of getting reliable guidance about the future, and beneath it a serious treatment of self-knowledge and self-deception. There is also a long, genuinely lyrical praise of the herb Pantagruelion, which is hemp, and of debt as the principle holding the universe together.

The Fourth Book. The voyage. They sail to consult the oracle of the Holy Bottle and stop at islands: the Papimanes, who worship the Decretals and faint at the sight of a picture of the pope; the Papefigues, ruined for insulting him; Shrovetide, an allegorical monster described anatomically for several chapters; the Chitterlings, who go to war; the island of Ruach where people live on wind. There is the celebrated episode of Panurge and the sheep, in which he buys one from a merchant who has cheated him, throws it overboard, and the whole flock follows, taking the merchant with them.

And there is the passage of the frozen words, where sounds from a battle fought the previous winter thaw in the air and become audible, which is Rabelais at his strangest and best.

The Fifth Book. Posthumous and doubtful. The voyage continues through a land of predatory Furred Cats, who are judges, to the temple of the Holy Bottle, where the oracle says one word: Drink.

How to read it

Use Screech. His translation is accurate, his chapter introductions explain what is being mocked, and without that apparatus half the book is noise. Urquhart’s seventeenth-century version is a glorious English work in its own right and is not reliable as a guide to Rabelais.

Do not read it straight through. This is a book to graze. Read Gargantua’s education chapters, the Picrocholine war, Theleme, the letter to Pantagruel, the Limousin student, Panurge’s sheep, and the frozen words, and then wander.

Skip the catalogues when they tire you and come back to them. They are genuinely funny and genuinely too long, both on purpose.

Expect the obscenity and do not treat it as separable from the argument. Rabelais was a physician who took the body seriously, and the insistence that eating, drinking, sex and excretion belong in the same book as Greek philology is the position, not the packaging.

Read Erasmus alongside. Rabelais read him closely, the two share an enemy in scholastic theology, and Praise of Folly is the same project in a smaller and safer form.

And keep asking what the laughter is for. Rabelais says in his prologue that his book is like a dog’s bone, to be cracked for the marrow, and then mocks readers who look for allegory. Deciding how much of that to believe is most of the fun.

Questions it raises

• Do what you will assumes that well-educated people naturally choose well. Is that a claim Rabelais believes or a thought experiment?
• The scholastic and humanist educations are both caricatured. What is the real difference between them?
• Panurge consults twelve authorities and learns nothing. Is the joke about oracles, or about him?
• Rabelais was condemned repeatedly and never recanted. How does writing under that threat shape a book this unguarded?
• The war starts over cakes. How far does the anatomy of escalation hold for real wars?
• What is the body doing in a humanist programme? Why does the same book contain Greek philology and a treatise on wiping?