One sign that a writer has attained truly classical status is the assignment to him or her of an individual identifying adjective of eponymity: Chaucerian bawdy, Shakespearean majesty, Miltonic grandeur, Hardyesque pessimism, Woolfian subtlety, whatever. (Please do not be put off by this florid introduction; I am practicing for a “Most Pretentious Sentence of the Week” contest in which I hope to compete. If “eponymity” isn’t a word, it ought to be one—meaning, of course, “that which gives its name to a habit, style, custom, or practice”.)
But it is true that I am perpetually reading such authors—meaning reading and rereading them in snatches, with no sense or desire of actually finishing them or even controlling a confident sense of where I am or where I am going with them or what they said the last time I picked them up. A few such works are generally lying around my bedstead, and when I wake up in the middle of the night and feel a little too awake to just roll over on my pillow I turn on the bed lamp and, with minimal comprehension, pick up one of my interminables, and spend a half hour with it. By then a renewed powerful somnolence has generally returned. The interminable of the moment is the works of Rabelais, five volumes in obsolete French, so the going is very slow, the prospect of completion very remote. Alternatively, I have an anthology of three books of Rachel Carson, a beautiful writer of English prose, The Sea Around Us. Carson is extraordinary in the scope and precision of her vocabulary. But her popular oceanography is still very much science, and often beyond my sure grasp. Yet I read on, and with enjoyment if not total confident comprehension.
But getting back to Rabelais, he is very much a writer who commands his own adjective. What is Rabelaisian is big, bold, boisterous, and bawdy. This is all true, though too many of his readers, including not a few experts in the field of Renaissance literature, even several of the contributors to the Rabelais Encyclopedia (2004), have in my opinion missed the forest in the trees. Rabelais is a satirical Christian moralist. His learning is immense, but the frequently ironical nature of its deployment is startlingly original and seems anything but pious. Yet as a default Christian believer he seems never to have entertained any other vocational ideal than that of the religious life. Here he got off to a false start by entering the Franciscan Order which, though it produced many important theologians, did not on the whole foster cloistered erudition. He was happier for a time with traditional Benedictine monachism, but eventually developed his own largely independent interpretation of the ascetic life, as so also did Erasmus, Thomas More, and several other eminent intellectuals of the period. At the center of the learned life of such men was a unifying and traditional intellectual quest: the study of the Bible. They believed the Bible at once to be transparent in its central historical presentation and moral doctrines and infinitely subtle, profound, oblique and challenging in its allegorical presentation. It was a gentle brook in which the lamb could safely wade, and a mighty river in which the elephant could plash and swim. So had said Gregory the Great.
Throughout the length of his own huge book or (books) Rabelais refers repeatedly to the biblical model: narrative with both a surface meaning and a hidden one that must be coaxed out with labor and ingenuity. Furthermore there are in his work literally hundreds of biblical citations and allusions, many of the latter of which are artistically purposeful and wittily constructed. Rabelais was of that stripe of traditional author who demands much of a reader. If you were reading his book, he seems to assume, you must have read many others before. I have in a long lifetime covered a good deal of his implicit reading list, but obviously not enough of it. While he was no ordinary churchman, Rabelais’s satirical attitudes are consistent with a major strain of Christian polemic as found in many of his famous predecessors including Dante and, especially, Jean de Meun in the Roman de la Rose. But I must not get lost in the weeds. Few things are more annoying than being told that you must read some book you have never heard of in order to understand some other such book. But any adventurous reader with a healthy sense of humor can enjoy Rabelais’s books. If you have an unhealthy sense of humor, you are guaranteed to enjoy them.
His five books deal with the lives and adventures of two giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel, father and son. The books combine studied, comical crudity with a remarkable erudition, social satire, and learned anecdote. Rabelais was among the first generation of European humanists for whom a command of the Greek language would be an expectation, and his Greek erudition is often on display. But he was no less deeply immersed in the living experience of his own times.
Rabelais’s theological anthropology is traditional, though uniquely expressed. As members of the human race we are all bipartite creatures, composed of both body and soul, flesh and spirit. And though the spirit may be willing, the flesh is weak. The moral paradox is that the base flesh wars against, and usually conquers the spirit. Critics long ago settled on the adjective carnivalesque to describe the Rabelasian style. Caro is the Latin word for flesh. The adjective carnal comes from this word. Human nature wants every day to be a Mardi Gras, a “fat Tuesday.” The literal and metaphorical expression of this sad truth is evident in every act of gluttony, eructation, dipsomania, and lasciviousness in the book—of which there are many. It is made real in the strange male sartorial acoutrement of the cod-piece. It is made real in what I can only call the author’s obsession with sausages. (One book chapter is little more than a nearly endless list of the various names of different sausages available in France!) He seems particularly partial to the andouille.
Around the edges of Rabelais a reader finds a mother load of fascinating detail concerning the material lives of our European ancestors half a millennium ago. The author intends to be outrageous and succeeds in his intention. Several of his attitudes, especially those exhibiting premodern clerical misogyny seem to be, and are, offensive to our sensibilities. Yet though they are obviously designed to shock, they bear the stamp of truth. The past is a foreign land, very foreign indeed; but like other lands, it can be visited. Should age or infirmity ever so oppress you as to forbid actual foreign travel, you probably already have the next best thing but an arm’s length away right there on a bookshelf.
