Rabelaisian

François Rabelais (d. 1554)

 

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.

 

 

Jeffrey What's-His-Name

 

When troubles arrive, they tend to arrive in cohorts, gangs, and conspiracies.  I would have though I already had enough difficulties in my life without these latest accusations.  But apparently nothing is too absurd for our malign press once their flaring nostrils have sniffed out what they think is a juicy story.  So, loathe though I am to dignify preposterous allegations by seeming to take them seriously, I am going to face these latest ones head-on.  Essentially, there is no truth in them whatsoever.  I barely knew Jeffrey Epstein.  Sort of sallow and shifty-looking, as I recall.  I am not even sure that I am spelling his name correctly.  Maybe it’s Epstien.  I knew a guy named Epstien once.  I can scarcely remember what the man looked like.  What limited contact I had with him, including all seven of my visits to his estate on Little Saint James, were related to the fortuitous coincidence of our shared interest in conchology.  Mr. Epstein maintained at his Caribbean estate a remarkable collection of seashells.  In that very misleading photograph of me with Mrs. Ambercrombie, which has repeatedly been published in the gutter press, we were jointly examining a rare specimen of a shell of the greater spotted whelk.

 

I came to know Mr. Epstein—if you can call an association so superficial “knowing” someone—only because he sought out my opinion on a matter apparently of interest to him, namely alchemy.  Somehow he learned of my work devoted to Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.  Whether you are familiar with this particular tale of the great poet, you are probably aware of the science, or rather pseudo-science, of alchemy.  The aim of alchemy was the transmutation of base metals (iron, tin, copper even old tinfoil cigarette wrappers) into gold.  This fantastic project, which captured the attention of even some of the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, had many deluded adherents.  In one of my own books on intellectual history I have devoted several pages to this strange phenomenon. Though rather cagey about the matter, Epstein seems actually to have believed that some similar process, adapted of course to the economic and social realities of modernity, was operative in our own world.   

 

“The so-called ‘Midas Touch’,” he once told me, “is an actual thing.  And I have got it.  A few years ago I was a high school teacher.  Yes, a f------ high school teacher!  Now Bill and Hillary send me birthday cards.”  I have not the slightest idea why he would tell me stuff like that.  I mean,  I barely met the man.  Didn’t really know him at all.  So where all this crap about me and Jeffrey Epstein came from I honestly cannot say.  Most of the time I was down there on the island, he wasn’t even there.  Or if he was, I never laid eyes on him.  There were just all these flunky-types wandering around with platters of hors d’oeuvres.  But my only interest, really, was the sea-shells.  I do have to admit that he had a fantastic collection. Probably the best I have ever seen, actually.  I’ll give him credit for that.

 

Somebody said about Whittaker Chambers that simply knowing the man was an indiscretion.  That’s certainly true as regards Epstein, which is why I am so glad I never knew him, not at all, really.  And of course I have absolutely no idea about the way he died.  Given the least opportunity, and I mean the very least, people will come up with the wildest conspiracy theories.  So naturally you have all this crap now about his death being “suspicious” because he was (supposedly) under continuous surveillance.  He was on so-called suicide watch.   Well…In the first place there is no such thing as “a twenty-four hour suicide watch.”  I mean, people do have to go to the bathroom and such.  Watching somebody, I mean really watching them, is harder work than you might think.  I mean, you really have to keep your eyes open the whole time.   And how long, actually, does it take you to hang yourself, especially when the rope is right there and all?  Now that was a bit of serendipity for Jeffrey.  I bet you could do it in under fifteen minutes, especially if you were really motivated.  And that man was really motivated.  Not that I actually know, of course, but it’s only logical that he would be.

 

From what the papers say, it looks as though there is going to be a lot more stuff coming out.  Why can’t people let sleeping dogs lie?  Why should dozens of more totally innocent people, men whose only fault was the indiscretion of knowing Geoffrey Epstein, be subjected to further embarrassment?  Look at Prince Andrew, for example.  Why that poor guy has been practically ruined simply because he had the bad luck of having Epstein pimping ‘teen-aged girls for him.  Did you listen to his long interview on the BBC a while ago?  They were out for blood, and they got it.  Guilt by association, that’s what it is.  Very un-American.  Likely to be un-British, too.

 

The gossip, innuendo, and baseless rumor is only likely to increase.  I am hoping for a presidential intervention.  Mr. Trump could cut this Gordian knot.  He seems to like to pardon people—selectively of course.  He ought to get Ghislaine Maxwell out of the clink and send her back to England on condition that she never speak, let alone write a word about Jeffrey Epstein for the rest of her life.   I mean, never mention the man’s name, whatever that was.  Slips my mind at the moment.

Extra

 

A VERY SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

 

I shall hope to continue some semblance of the weekly blog on Wednesday, February 4.  In the meantime, I have an announcement of cardinal importance.  Shortly before midnight last, February 1, 2026, at the NYU Langone Hospital on First Avenue in New York City, our eldest granddaughter, Sophia Fleming-Benite gave birth to a strapping boy, rumored to be name Oliver.  Sophia and her husband Raymond Wang are reported to be in an ecstatic state, while young Oliver demonstrates the appropriately boisterous combination of wonderment and indignation at having been thrust into the World as We Know It.  Unto us a child is born!  Please join us in welcoming him.  My own entirely passive role in this blessed event in my instant transition (let’s call it a promotion) to great-grand-parental status.  I now have a title consonant with the antiquity I feel.

Blizzard of '26

 

The Blizzard of Twenty Six seems to have reached a point of significant remission.  I am going to at least pretend that it has, even though I won’t really know until daylight arrives. And so I am declaring a personal remission as well.  The last ten days have not been without their difficulties on the health front, and my health aide Christie Kadelu and I have been—in the absurd phrase reserved for such occasions—holding down the fort in a kind of unsplendid isolation.  As you may be aware, there has been snow in these parts, quite a lot of it, and no small amount of ice.  Joan is for a while tucked into a rehab facility a few miles up the road.  Our telephonic communication, though frequent, is inevitably a bit wistful.  Not quite Pyramis and Thisbe, but getting too close.  My great buddy Frank is probably at this very moment surveying the Great Pyramid and the Giza Necropolis in Egypt.  He beat the blizzard by about twelve hours, and I won’t be watching any movies with him for the next three weeks.

 

In many ways the big snow is a pleasing distraction.  The tone of our national political life is rarely inspiring, but the current atmosphere seems especially poisonous.  I am loathe to contribute to the near hysteria.  I do not believe that it is 1858, but I do increasingly fear that the spirit of American democracy, if not its actual institutions, is being coarsened and cheapened by fruitless and polemical self-indulgence and self-righteousness.  The Question of America, it seems to me, has always been this: can we possibly live up to our own hype?  This is just my clumsy version of the question famously raised by Abraham Lincoln in his address at Gettysburg.  Can a nation founded on truly democratic ideals actually endure?

 

The explosive atmosphere of mutual distrust and political loathing in Minneapolis is the context in which two of our fellow citizens lost their lives.  Police agents have difficult and dangerous jobs.   They also frequently have big guns.  The principal purpose of big guns is to kill people, so that it is hardly surprising that they frequently do so.  But the pity of it all.  The waste of it all.  The madness of it all.  The two deaths differ in particularity but not in their shared moral insult.  And perhaps reflection over time will acknowledge the madness, and the nation will try to step back from it in honest penitential reflection, though what I see so far is mainly absurd tribal spin.

 

I am moved once again to invoke the Goheen Principle, which I derive from the late and much admired Princeton President Robert Goheen: never be sure that you are more than about eighty per cent right.  The number of hundred percenters seems ever on the rise.  Yet we can, though not without humility, strive with Lincoln, to advance “with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”

 

I hope that this brief place-holding post might at least serve as the expression of an intent to return to business as usual next week, by which time I hope to be ambulatory and reasonably compos mentis.  Even have some hopes for the corpus part.

 

Inauspicious

I have been quite ill in the hospital since Christmas, home as of yesterday but still feeling very feeble.   Diagnosis macro flu.  Very debilitating.  Joan is still at the Stonebridge Rehab but doing well.  Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.  I may well pause the public blog postings.  Heroic help from friends and family.  Happy New Year to all. 

Mayhem and Mystery

    I continue to flatter myself that I am a reasonably informed person. I cursorily scan the newspaper each day, and until fairly recently Joan and I were regulars in watching the PBS Newshour. But I apparently don’t take all that much in, or at least don’t retain it. One evidence of this is that I am frequently blindsided by events involving eminent Americans of whose existence I have apparently been unaware. Being murdered seems a grotesque way of coming to my attention, but it has happened a couple of times just recently. I seem to have been one of few Americans who learned about the existence of the Republican Party activist Charlie Kirk only from the news of his brutal extinction. Just this week, in similar fashion, I was unaware of the name of an obviously very important movie director, Rob Reiner, even though I had seen a couple of memorable films he had produced, until he too was murdered, along with his wife. The most immediate shooting took place at Brown University in Rhode Island, and one of the random victims was an undergraduate student who by chance was also a Young Republican. This factoid invited, and received, predictable speculation. It is the nature of the human mind to resist the idea of random mindlessness and to impose upon chaos a purposeful surface.

     The frequency of our American mayhem makes it difficult to really get into the Christmas spirit. Murders never have much to recommend them, but these are acts of evil that perhaps cannot fail, and most assuredly have not failed to become political emblems of our national discontent. Charlie Kirk was an effective political operator within the political apparatus of the more conservative circles of Republicans. He either actually was, or  and plausibly became, a virtual emblem of the American far right. Rob Reiner, a movie actor, director and prominent Hollywood personality, was a conspicuous artistic and financial success. He was also an outspoken dispenser of liberal political opinions and an Obama schmoozer. Perhaps this was enough to make of him in minds so inclined an emblem of “the left.” For purposes of what follows I will dispense with such ordinarily prudent words as alleged and reported, as the crimes alleged and reported did happen. I can only assume that the killers are literally madmen whose mental pathologies are probably so severe as to render their sanity questionable. This seems manifest on the surface in one of the cases. Certainly the killers in each instance have disturbing qualities almost requiring allegorization. But they do not require the crudest form of politicization, which is what they are getting.  

    Mr. Kirk’s killer is a furry, or perhaps only furry-adjacent. If you didn’t know what a “furry” is, join the club. I learn from an on-line dictionary that a furry is “an enthusiast for animal characters with human characteristics, in particular a person who dresses up in costume as such a character or uses one as an avatar online”. The typical misuse of the noun avatar suggests the quality of online dictionaries. Furriness or furdom thus is apparently a lifestyle, presumably a niche lifestyle. At least I had not before this heard talk of it. Mr. Reiner’s killer was his own thirty-something son, who made a clean sweep of things by killing his mother at the same time.  Parricide is a rare crime that must always challenge our very concept of human personality. These murders certainly do. The Reiner family was wealthy and moved in important social circles. The report that that killer-son was “troubled” may seem something of an understatement. He was “battling” addiction to “substances” for many years. He had received official rehabilitation nearly twenty times. The manifest pathology of the situation demands the stilted language for its description. 

     My stiff tone is not meant to disregard the pathos and human suffering that are the substratum of journalistic gossip. Narcotic addiction is a terrible scourge. It is terrible for the addict, and terrible too for widening concentric rings of the addict’s associates. It is terrible for our body politic as a whole. And it is no respecter of persons. Just like all those other annoying things your mother used to tell you, it is sadly true that money cannot buy happiness. But it can pay for a strong and competent legal defense. So although Nick Reiner has yet to be arraigned, there is already a buzzing conversation about the high legal fees to be paid to a celebrity defense attorney from the patrimony of the parricide. Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. I read that in a book somewhere. 

    It is difficult to think about such matters with unstinting honesty. Among the most memorable of the of the Maxims of Rochefoucauld is the following zinger: “In the misfortunes of our best friends, we always find something which is not displeasing to us.” The celebrities whose stories are the stuff of newspapers—a celebrity being someone who is famous for being famous—have much less psychic purchase than our friends. True enough, the annals of the rich are perhaps often more lengthy and complex than those of the poor, but they are often just as tragic. Their pathologies should be comforting to no one. But for the grace of God… If you don’t believe in the grace of God—and you ought to—you can imagine it is just good luck. 

    What I most dislike about winter is not so much the cold as the dark, and as I write this, we are already two days past the year’s longest night. This fact, based in a stable astronomy, is the likely reason for the traditional calendrical dating of Christmas, the allegorical date to which the birth of Jesus Christ is assigned. The event is theological even before it is calendrical. As my namesake John famously put it, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not blot it out.” So neither the cold nor the dark will finally prevail. That’s the gist of it. Merry Christmas—merry and bright.  Peace on earth, and good will to all.

Calibri Controversy

Gothic "book hand"

 

            It took thirteen pages of last Thursday’s Times before I found anything sufficiently stimulating to contemplate as a possible blog topic; but it was worth the wait.  At the heart of an article on page thirteen was Calibri.  As a one-time active amateur letterpress printer, I was nearly thrilled to come upon an article that captured the passionate potential lurking in typefaces.  For Calibri is the name of a typeface launched about a twenty years ago by the Dutch typographer Lucas de Groot.  I don’t know how many typophiles are likely to read my blog, but in case there might be one or two I will say that Calibri is one of the newer “C” fonts, which also include the one I usually use on my own computer, Cambria, fonts that are generally elegant, conservative, unfussy, and maximally legible.  But apparently in the eyes of the current presidential administration Calibri is also suspiciously woke.  Marco Rubio has ordered the State Department to stop using it and to return to the allegedly less edgy Times New Roman.

 

            We now tend to call the original Gutenberg font, that used in the famous forty-two line Bible, “Gothic” or black letter.  It was in fact based on the common “book hand” of the professional scribes of late medieval manuscripts.  Gutenberg, even in the revolutionary act that was letterpress printing, was entirely traditional in his type face.  That is, he tried to make printed text look exactly like hand-written (i.e. scribal) text.  For many years most printing remained “black letter”.  Even when I was in graduate school a large number of German language books I had to consult were in a “Gothic” face.  The modernization of German language printing type faces came about by German governmental policy in 1941, a date at which one might be forgiven for thinking the Germans had bigger things to worry about.  But a modern political movement wanted to make a modern presentation.  The Nazis really looked sharp.  If Calibri is woke, fifteenth-century black letter must be—what?  What is the opposite of woke?  Somnolent, perhaps, or drowsy?

 

            I alluded in my last essay to the twin aims to which poetry should aspire according to the poet Horace: utility and beauty, instruction and pleasure.   Many other social habits combine similar goals.  That the mechanical reproduction of writing was useful was perhaps too obvious to talk about; almost immediately typographers began the competition to make it ever more beautiful as well.  Everyone I suppose is familiar with the distinction between Roman and Italic faces, though if you think about Rome as a city in Italy things can become confusing.   In the great age of the Scholar-Printers the rebirth of learning demanded also a rebirth of scribal form.  The artistic impulse of typography began even before Gutenberg.   A picture being worth some large number of words, I recommend you make a visit to the Letterform Archive museum in San Francisco, which you can do either in person or (as I myself do) via a computer screen.  I don’t know whether, as Secretary Rubio seems to suggest, typefaces vary in their political or cultural wokeness, but surely San Francisco would be the place to find out.

 

            In Gothic book hand—the term often used of the common learned calligraphy of the fifteenth century—the letters i, j, l, m, n, u, and v were composed of what look at first glance like similar if not identical straight vertical strokes.  The technical term for this mark is a minim, also used by musicians to indicate a half-note.  A minim is definitely minimal, sort of the least thing that can be done, calligraphically or musically speaking.  The minim invites visual ambiguity.  The ambitions of verbal communication, on the other hand are maximal, and such early printers as Manutius Aldus in Venice supervised the creation of new fonts (based in ancient classical

monumental sources) both beautiful and precise.

 

            Even in the weird political climate which we are forced to endure, I find it curious, to say the least, that grown men can find the sustenance for their political outrage in the inconsiderable differences between two popular and undramatic modern type fonts.  But of course nobody can really believe that typography has much to do with it.  Our politics have become so fundamentally polarized as not even to require identifiable poles.

 

            Perhaps the English-speaking world, or at least the dominant American parts of it, should adopt an official national typeface.  That might be accomplished without political controversy because of the blandness of the creator of the typeface and its role in our revolutionary history.  It was the typeface of our own sacred foundational documents.  It has been around so long that no one could accuse it of being the slightest bit woke.  Semi-somnolent, perhaps, but that is a different matter.  The natural candidate typeface would be Caslon.  We know quite a bit about William Caslon, who supervised the casting for the punches.  He flourished, to use the old phrase, in the first half of the eighteenth century in London.  The early printers included many rather bold and politically engaged men, but so far as I can tell Caslon was not one of them.  He was a stolid, practical businessman, a fine craftsman, and the founder of an incipient dynasty of typographers dominant in the London trade for more than a century.  Historians have perhaps exaggerated the aesthetic aspect of the early printing industry at the expense of the economic.  Caslon did well.  Yet one will not find a single memorable fact about him in his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography  that might make him stand out as a personality.  His solid, stolid, beautiful, and unwoke typefaces long dominated English-language typography, and they are still around.  Familiarity and legibility are hallmarks of Caslon, or would be if types had hallmarks.  The face presents but one danger and that a minor one.  One form of the lower-case letter s, called the “long” s, has a vertically lengthened form that can sometimes be confused with lower-case f.  In an era in which the f-word was still transgressive, this typographical curiosity was once the source of great hilarity to the students in a graduate seminar meeting at which I was present more than sixty years ago.  But social mores evolve in history no less than does printing  technology.  The only verbal transgressions likely to be noted today are heresies involving class, race, or gender.  But not to worry.  There is an abundant supply of them.  We cannot soon run out of outrage.

 

 

Comfortable Caslon