[In the following essay, Nilles argues that Rabelais deliberately evades a sense of finality and resolution in the conclusion of the Quart Livre.]

The Quart Livre, which appeared in 1552, is the last work whose authorship is uncontestably attributed to François Rabelais. It may seem ironic that an author who had devoted three volumes to the comic exploits of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel should introduce the final installment of their “faicts et dicts” (“words and deeds”) with a praise of moderation. But, rather than an absence of extremes, the Quart Livre's prologue sees moderation as the joining of contraries in one harmonious whole, as exemplified by the narrator's own “moderate” wish for good health, in which a sound mind and a sound body sustain one another in a mutually salutary relationship.¹ Paradoxically, the narrative which follows is itself bereft of the virtues exalted in the prologue. Each of the ideologies or cults encountered in the course of the voyage is preoccupied with a single aspect of human activity to the exclusion of all others. The journey presents a proliferation of frameworks and shifting perspectives, fragmenting the prologue's vision, continuously postponing the moment of wholeness the prologue so fervently extols. Nowhere is the Quart Livre's irresolution more evident than at the book's closure, precisely the moment when a resolution of some kind can most reasonably be expected. The final island visited on the Quart Livre's journey, Gaster's kingdom, poses more questions than it answers, while the remaining chapters defer the voyage's end by detaining the heroes in the middle of the open sea.

The present study explores the interaction of the forces of cohesion and disjunction in the Quart Livre's concluding chapters, the episodes relating to the visit to Gaster's domain, and the events which take place off the coasts of Chaneph and Ganabin. Here provisional solution is given to the diverse themes that converge in the Gaster episode, first by the strange and mysterious list of prodigies which concludes the Gaster chapters, and then by the episode which follows the visit to Gaster's realm, the becalming off the island of Chaneph. Neither the prodigy list nor the becalming, however, provides the final word (the “mot”) which will answer the questions underlying the Quart Livre's quest. In Rabelais's work, the desire for completion and fullness coexists with their constant deferral, engaging them not in a repetitive and ultimately fruitless pattern of reversal and mutual negation but in dynamic, creative process.

The episode of Gaster is rich, complex, and ambiguous, as attested by the many interpretations it has engendered.² Recently a number of studies have given up the search for a single intended sense; they have seen instead a polyvalence of meaning.³ François Rigolot and Michel Jeanneret both see Gaster's multiple attributes organizing themselves around two poles, one negative and one positive. As he is first introduced, Gaster is the stomach, a concrete, inert object, “rond, dur inflectible” [round, hard … inflexible], indomitable, feared for his absolute tyranny. Later, “Gasterventre” assumes a new identity, “Gaster-faber,” becoming a form of energy and renewal, a benevolent force, source and inspiration of all human progress. Gaster brings together in one being two aspects of human existence which the medieval world view held to be mutually exclusive: material need, which humans share with all forms of animal life and which reduces them to their level, and a will to transcend imposed limitations, to improve the condition of life, to assert superiority over brute nature. Gaster does not resolve the differences between matter and energy but engages them in a fertile dialogue, providing the occasion for them mutually to illuminate one another: material need takes on new meaning when it is placed at the source of all human achievement; technical progress issanctioned by locating its inspiration in a natural, visceral drive. In Gaster good and evil meet, the natural and the unnatural, individual self-interest and collective well-being. He embraces contradiction, points toward the moment of fullness and completion.

The promise of fulfillment is not kept, however. In the concluding paragraphs, Gaster is abandoned. His episode is never brought to closure, the leave-taking and departure from his island are never related. Instead, a new subject is introduced, usurping his power and replacing him. The list of arts and sciences invented by Gaster to cultivate, protect, and transport grain ends with his discovery of a way to make bullets return to their source; then a lengthy digression describes natural phenomena capable of repelling damaging influences in an equally fantastic manner. When the list draws to a close, we find ourselves at sea once more, headed for the island of Chaneph.

Critical studies have devoted little attention to the prodigy list, tending to dismiss it as a mere “facétie,” as a satire of popular belief in the occult powers of prodigies, as a smoke screen thrown up to conceal the ending of an already obscure episode.⁴ The prodigy list, however, is an integral part of the Gaster episode, intimately linked to it by a series of structural and thematic bonds, yet remote enough in character to furnish a perspective which gives Gaster new meaning.

The prodigy list takes up structures of thought and style first introduced in the opening paragraphs of Gaster's episode but never completely resolved during the visit to his domain. Its paratactic structure recalls a similar arrangement in the first chapter of the Gaster sequence. There the animals forced to submit to Gaster's rule are enumerated. Both lists are displays of power, Gaster subjugating the animal realm, the prodigies exerting mysterious forces to expel or repel foreign substances. Both lists also attempt to exert power over their readers, commanding their attention through the repetition of attention-riveting devices (“Et tout pour la trippe” [And all for the gut's sake], “Attendu que …” [Given that …], respectively) and persuading them of the truth of the argument through the number and diversity of the examples called forth to support it.

The two lists exert very different forms of power, however. The first list groups together various wild animals according to shared characteristics and shows them performing a variety of feats to satisfy Gaster's whims. Animals, birds, and fish proliferate, verbs multiply, the list takes on epic proportions as the entire animal kingdom is whipped to a clamorous frenzy by Gaster's imperious demands. Prefiguring the role he will later play in the process of civilization, Gaster is here given credit for the domestication of the animal kingdom: “Mesmes es animans brutaulx il apprend ars desniées de Nature” [Even to brute beasts he teaches arts which Nature had denied them].⁵

The prodigies' power lies not in their ability to inspire the pursuit of “unnatural” knowledge but, on the contrary, in their capacity to expel or repel foreign objects and return the victims of violation to their unaltered, natural state. The list includes a plant which expels iron objects embedded in wood; dittany, which expels arrows embedded in flesh; laurels, fig trees, and seals, whose odors repel lightening; a ram whose sight returns maddened elephants to their senses; wild fig trees which overcome the fury of raging bulls and put them in a stupor; and beech trees, which calm fierce serpents. The repeated purgings create the impression that the list is advancing toward a state of ever greater serenity. It also continues to gain in strength, each prodigy possessing a more compelling force than the preceding and exercising it over a more intractable subject. While initially they control only inanimate objects (iron, arrows), their dominion soon extends to the most ferocious of beasts (wild elephants, maddened bulls, venomous serpents). A final progression involves the nature of the impurity expelled or repelled and evolves from the concrete to the abstract. The initial prodigies extract only foreign objects (metal, arrows), but later prodigies eradicate intangible forces or conditions (madness, rage) interfering with the subject's essential being. Unlike the animal list, in which all creatures were reduced to the same level by their common material need, the prodigy list describes an ascending movement, evolving according to the same principles that had governed Gaster's successive transformations and, like him, encompassing in its range both the material and the abstract.

All progressions reach their full extension in the myth of the elder tree, which occupies the terminal point in the prodigy list, just as Gaster is the last in the series of island rulers. Grown in the most remote regions, the elder tree is used to fabricate flutes whose divine music immediately captivates all listeners. Like Gaster, the elder tree is the most powerful element in the sequence it concludes: the king of beasts himself is astounded and falls mute before the music of its flutes. And, like Gaster, the elder joins in one object the material (the flute composed of organic matter) and the intangible (the force of its haunting music). The elder, however, stands in direct opposition to Gaster and all that he represents. To assure the most perfect instruments, the elder must be grown so far from society that “le chant des coqs ne sera ouy” [the cock's crow will not be heard]. Civilization, Gaster's greatest accomplishment, becomes here a force of corruption, interfering with the purity of the natural state. Nor is this the only difference between Gaster and the remarkable tree. While Gaster's achievements are rooted in the material sphere, the elder exercises its power through the divine music of its flutes; while Gaster proceeds by increasing knowledge, the elder gains force from withdrawing to a purer, as yet uncorrupted state; while Gaster reigns in the midst of feverish activity and inarticulate babbling, the elder flourishes in an atmosphere of peace, tranquility, and silence.

Silence becomes another feature common to the beginning and the end of the Gaster episode. Gaster too inhabits a world without sound: “Il ne oyt poinct.” [He hears nothing.] He rules creation through silent signs while remaining impervious to verbal appeals. Language, an abstract, symbolic system of communication, is replaced by one which is at once more organic and more efficient. Demonstrating the power of his silent signs, they are compared to the most terrifying and imperious of audible commands, the roar of the king of beasts, and clearly emerge victorious: all creatures shiver at the sound of the lion's outburst, but Gaster's commands move the very heavens and the earth.

The silence surrounding the elder tree is achieved only through complete withdrawal from the material reign Gaster wishes to subjugate. Like Gaster, the elder is also able to impose silence on all that surrounds it. The lion is called forth once more to test the mysterious force its flutes exert. Upon hearing their music, “le lion, animant de si grande force et constance, devient tout estonné et consterné” [the lion, a beast of such great strength and fortitude, is totally amazed and dumbfounded] (2: 230). The beast is again overcome and subdued but by a power quite different from that exerted by Gaster. The lion is not outdone or defeated by a superior physical force but rather is awe-struck, inspired with reverential fear for something so sublime that it transcends all earthly experience.

To explain why the elder must be grown out of earshot of cock's crow and to account for the unusual power invested in its flutes, the narrator resorts to allegory. In the opening paragraphs of the episode, allegory had also been invoked to explain the irregularities of the island's physical surface: although access to Gaster's realm is unusually difficult, once the crew has overcome the initial obstacles, they discover fields so verdant and delightful that they could easily be mistaken for the earthly paradise. Pantagruel immediately recognizes in the island's geographical disposition the physical realization of Hesiod's allegory and announces to his friends that they have come upon Virtue's domain.⁶ As further exploration of the island soon reveals, the giant is mistaken: no abstract truth lies behind the island's mysterious configuration, only Gaster's gross materiality.⁷ The physical surface cannot be read allegorically, its confusion and contradiction cannot be resolved by appealing to transcendent reality. The signs that tease Pantagruel into prematurely giving them meaning never deliver the fullness they promise.

In the concluding paragraphs of Gaster's episode, the possibility that an abstract truth informs concrete reality is again raised. The fact that flutes should be made only from elders grown where “le chant des coqs ne sera ouy” can be interpreted literally to mean that they must be fabricated from wild elder wood, or “plus haultement, non selon la lettre, mais allegoricquement” [in a higher sense, not according to the letter, but allegorically] (2: 230). Here the narrator recalls the example of the Pythagoreans who, in saying that the statue of Mercury should not be made from any sort of wood indiscriminately, meant that God should not be worshipped in the common fashion but in a special, religious way. In like manner, to say that flutes should come only from trees grown in remote areas means that “les gens saiges et studieux ne se doibvent adonner à la musique triviale et vulgaire, mais à la celeste, divine, angelique, plus absconse et de plus loing apportée” [wise and studious people should not devote themselves to trivial and vulgar music, but to heavenly, divine, angelic music, which is more abstruse and comes from a a greater distance] (2: 230).

The use of allegory again posits the simultaneous coexistence of two realities, spiritual and material, in a single object, while the interpretations given to both the Pythagorean allegory and the allegory of the elder tree confirm that possibility by clearly distinguishing two modes of being: the “triviale et vulgaire,” everyday existence preoccupied with material needs and their satisfaction, and the “esleue et religieuse” [special and religious], the “celeste, divine, angelique, plus absconce,” to which it urges the “gens saiges et studieux” to aspire. Unlike the episode's beginning, nothing follows to cast doubt on the validity of allegorical readings or to contradict those advanced by the narrator. At the end of the episode the possibility is left open that matter and spirit might achieve harmonious solution in a meaningful whole.

Although Gaster overcomes the inertia of matter, transforming it into a source of energy and inspiration, his domain remains strictly material: he does not admit the duality of human nature and offers nothing to satisfy spiritual aspirations. The prodigy list introduces a new spiritual reality, upsetting the provisional balance Gaster achieved, pointing up his shortcomings by recalling various aspects of his reign but reproducing them in a totally alien register. The two extremes of the episode, beginning and end, present specular images of one another, the material and the immaterial meeting once more in a confrontation that appears to preclude a final, uniform solution. The prodigy list becomes a pivotal moment in the text: it creates a new perspective from which to look back on Gaster, to see his incompleteness, to put in context his awesome power. At the same time, the prodigy list confronts Gaster's materiality with its own spirituality, introducing a new dialogue which becomes the generative principle of the chapters to follow.

The approach to Chaneph, the next island on the Quart Livre's itinerary, is hardly filled with the promise that the sighting of Gaster's domain had held forth. Not far from the island, the giant and his friends are becalmed and unable to draw near enough to land. With the loss of wind the crew has lost its principal source of occupation and each member is forced to find a way to fill time. They listlessly engage in a variety of trivial and unproductive pursuits, unrelated by a common incentive or a sense of community. Finally, to amuse themselves, they each formulate a riddle to address to Pantagruel.

No wind, no activity, no answers—the series of absences which qualify the chapter's beginning are not entirely negative, however. The very prospect of an answer infects the crew with eager anticipation. As they await their turn to pose their question, they become animated emotionally and physically. They emerge from their torpor to regain their good humor (“en grande alaigresse d’esprit” [with a very light heart], “en guayeté de coeur” [with joy in his heart]) and shake off their lethargy to engage in physical activity (“soy levant en pieds” [rising to his feet], “s’estant un peu frotté le front et sescoué les aureilles” [having rubbed his forehead a little and shaken his ears]). Want has stimulated interest and activity, heightened the expectation of fulfillment, and increased the tension of anticipation.

Pantagruel promises his friends a “seule solution” in terms implying that he will do more than merely furnish an answer to their riddles:

A tous les doubtes et quaestions par vous propousées compete une seule solution, et à tous telz symptomates et accidens une seule medicine. La response vous sera promptement expousée, non par longs ambages et discours de parolles: l’estomach affamé n’a poinct d’aureilles, il n’oyt goutte. Par signes, gestes et effectz serez satisfaicts et aurez resolution à vostre contentement. (2: 233)

[A single solution will be sufficient to all the doubts and questions you have raised and a single medicine to all such symptoms and accidents. The answer will be given to you promptly, without circumlocutions and wordy discourses: a hungry stomach has no ears, it hears nothing. You will be satisfied through signs, gestures, and demonstrations and will have the solution you desire.]

To the pre-existing voids, Pantagruel has added yet another hunger, which associates the need for answers with physical appetites. At the same time he has provided the clue to Gaster's identity so pointedly withheld in the previous episode, suggesting that his “seule solution” will resolve the other unanswered questions raised by the visit to that island.

Pantagruel does not offer his “seule solution” immediately but promises to reveal it after the crew has dined. Gratification is again deferred, but now that the crew has received assurance of an ultimate resolution, the wait takes on a pleasant, agreeable character. The waiting period is filled with eating and drinking, both undertaken in a spirit quite different from the gluttonous gorging of Gaster's feast. As always in Rabelais, the banquet, with its deep evangelical and classical associations not only offers satisfaction to the physical appetite but generates the conviviality and exchange that provide satisfaction on yet another level. Here, moreover, the activity of eating and drinking actually occupies the time in which the “seule solution” is given. At the end of the meal the crew is astonished to discover that all the voids of the chapter's beginning have been filled: food and drink have satisfied hunger and thirst, pleasant activity has occupied free time, silence and isolation have been overcome by the banquet's warm camaraderie, the riddles have all received answers, the sails are filled with fresh wind. The satisfaction of physical appetite coincides with the satisfaction of all other wants.

Once all the riddles have been answered, in an order quite different from that in which they were posed, there remains only Frère Jean's “Maniere de haulser le temps?” [A way to make the wind rise?], a query whose importance is heightened by the fact that it is the first to be asked, and the last to be answered. To be sure, the riddle is loaded with significance: “haulser le temps” means to make the wind come up and also to pass away time.⁸ The question raised by the riddle simultaneously articulates all of the chapter's initial voids, increasing expectation, challenging Pantagruel to provide an answer which will satisfy them all.

Pantagruel's answer is only a verbal confirmation of what everyone has already experienced. He first replies by inviting the crew to observe the physical evidence before them: “Maniere de haulser le temps? Ne l’avons nous à soubhayt haulsé? Voyez le guabet de la hune. Voyez les siflemens des voiles. Voyez la roiddeur des estailz, des utacques et des scoutes.” [A way to make the wind rise? Have we not raised it satisfactorily? Look at the pennant on top of the mast. Listen to the whistling of the sails. Look at the tautness of the stays, the ties, and the sheets.] He then associates the rising wind with the satisfaction of physical appetites by repeating the word “haulser” in a different context and giving it new meaning: “Nous haulsans et vuidans les tasses, s’est pareillement le temps haulsé par occulte sympathie de Nature” (2: 239). [While we were raising and emptying our cups, the wind also rose by Nature's hidden sympathies.] The giant's pun brings together divergent thematic possibilities in one formal unit and reveals unforeseen similarities between them. As a result, human activity, which had surpassed natural limitations under Gaster's reign, is once more integrated into Nature's plan: human will corresponds to the will of Nature.

What Pantagruel's pun achieves on the formal level, wine achieves on the thematic level. Throughout Rabelais's work, wine operates as an image in both the material and the spiritual realms. While it is a natural substance, consumed in response to an organic stimulus, providing material satisfaction and physical pleasure, it is also a source of inspiration, endowed with the power to elevate the mind and spirit. Here wine appears under both species, as the physical substance which satisfies the crew's thirst and as a gift of divine Bacchus, by which, as Pantagruel recalls, “sont hault eslevez les espritz des humains, leurs corps evidentement alaigriz, et assouply ce que en eulx estoit terrestre” [human minds are raised high, their bodies noticeably lightened, and what was most earthy in them made pliant] (2: 241). Wine too is a single solution in which the material and the spiritual coexist.

The “seule solution” offers satisfaction to both spiritual and material need and mediates extremes on both the semiotic and thematic level. Satisfaction, however, is not achieved by supplying what is lacking to produce a completed whole. Instead, like the prodigy list, it involves reduction to a simpler form, a purer state of being. In the opening chapter of the episode, Pantagruel had looked upon his friends' questions as “symptomates et accidens,” as aberrations interfering with the health of the mind. Later he applied the same vocabularly to hunger, which he termed a “perturbation,” a temporary deviation from normalcy. To both he promised a cure: his friends' doubts would be dispelled with a “seule medicine,” just as their hunger would be “guéri” [cured] by eating and drinking. In both cases, resolution entails the elimination of accidental, occasional characteristics, the return to an essential mode of being, the recovery of the health and wholeness that had been the prologue's “moderate wish.”

At the same time, satisfaction is presented as a dynamic process rather than a state of finality or as a suppression of desire. In giving thanks for the meal, Panurge does not neglect to express gratitude for both the relief from hunger it effects and the pleasure taken in effecting it:

Sans poinct de faulte nous doibvons bien louer le bon Dieu nostre createur, servateur, conservateur, qui par ce bon pain, par ce bon vin et frays, par ces bonnes viandes nous guerist de telles perturbations, tant du corps comme de l’ame, oultre le plaisir et volupté que nous avons beuvans et mangeans. (2: 239)

[Without question we should surely praise the good Lord our Creator, Savior, and Preserver who through this good bread, this good, fresh wine, and these good meats cures disorders, both of the body and of the soul, not to mention the pleasure and sensual delight that we have in drinking and eating.]

Fulfillment is realized not only at the meal's end but in the very act of consumption. Similarly, when Pantagruel promises to answer his friends' questions only after they have shared a meal together, he appears to be only delaying the moment of truth. But, as the crew discovers, the answer to all their questions lies in the very act which seems to postpone it; meaning lies in deferment itself.

Finally, satisfaction is not presented as a state of fullness and plenitude. The act which fills the stomach is described as an emptying (“vuidans les tasses” [emptying the cups], “vuidans les victuailles” [unloading the provisions] of the ship) while the providing of an answer is seen as a way to “vuider doubtes” [clear up doubts]. The same lightness and insubstantiality characterize the agent which brings about fulfillment: a “legiere solution” [easy solution] to questions, the spirituality of wine and wind. Once satisfied, the body becomes “plus legier” [more nimble], “alaigriz” [lighter]. Freed from the constraints of sensual appetite, it is “emancip[é] de jeun” [liberated from fasting]. Buoyed by their new-found levity, like the lifted tankards (the “tasses haulsées”) or the raised winds (“le temps haulsé”), spirits, too, are raised. The satisfied subjects pass from the material state to the incorporeal: doubts are dissolved (“resolus”), dead time is eliminated (“haulsé”). Tracing the curve inscribed by Gaster's episode, the process of fulfillment passes from the concrete to the abstract, from an impure to a pure condition, from the state of material need to the state of inspiration and enlightenment. In the act of satisfying hunger, the material and the spiritual are joined. A sound mind is established in a sound body, realizing the prologue's “moderate wish” for good health. Gaster's demands must be met but their satisfaction frees man to pursue needs of another, less tangible order: satisfaction creates the void that generates desire.⁹

The Quart Livre's voyage in search of the single, unequivocal “mot” of the Dive Bouteille continuously proceeds toward that end but never achieves it. The concluding chapters even betray an effort to avoid finality: the crew bypasses the islands of Chaneph and Ganabin, the last stops on the Quart Livre's itinerary, in favor of the unlimited horizons of the open sea. The narrative shows a similar hesitation to come to closure: Gaster's domain is the last island visited but it only partially resolves the problems raised in the course of the voyage. The episode of the becalming provides thematic resolution, but it is not the final episode. The actual ending of the Quart Livre, the episode relating Panurge's fear at the prospect of landing on the island of thieves and robbers, introduces an entirely new narrative sequence, all the more disruptive because it calls back the fear-bedeviled Panurge, who had not appeared in that guise since the storm, some 40 chapters earlier. Neither the voyage nor the narrative is focused on the ending which should give them meaning, on satisfaction or fulfillment, but on the process of discovery itself: the quest, the search for meaning, the dynamic operations they set in motion. The last “mot” of the Quart Livre marks anything but finality. “Beuvons!” [Let's drink!], Panurge cries, celebrating thirst, the open mouth, and the unsatisfied desire that had marked the Quart Livre's beginning and now marks its end.

Notes

1. The subversion of the prologue's praise of moderation begins, according to Alfred Glauser and Floyd Gray, as early as the prologue itself, where the stylistic extravagance of the narrator's encomium undermines its purported message. See Rabelais créateur (Paris: Nizet, 1964), p. 38, and Rabelais et l’écriture (Paris: Nizet, 1974), pp. 28-29.

2. Among positivistic historical readings, Jean Plattard sees an exposition of historical materialism, La Vie de François Rabelais (Paris: G. Van Oest, 1928), p. 304; V. L. Saulnier, a defense of philosophical materialism, Rabelais dans son enquête, 2 vols. (Paris: SEDES, 1982) 2: 124-29; Robert Marichal, the development of one of St. Paul's epistles, “Quart Livre commentaires,” Etudes Rabelaisiennes, 1 (Genève: Droz, 1956), 151-202.

3. Three of the most important recent pluralistic studies are Michel Jeanneret's “Les Paroles dégelées,” Littérature, 17 (fév. 1975), 14-30, in which he investigates thematic polyvalence in the last eighteen chapters of the Quart Livre; François Rigolot's reading of Gaster in Les Langages de Rabelais, Etudes Rabelaisiennes, 10 (Genève: Droz, 1972), 152-60, which emphasizes the episode's thematic ambiguity as well as the ambiguity that arises as a result of the conflict between the episode's style and its ostensible message; and Terence Crave's essay, “Reading Rabelais: Variations on the Rock of Virtue,” in Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 78-95, which explores the agonistic dialogue set in motion by the episode's multiple frames of reference.

4. Rigolot calls the prodigy list “pure facétie,” claiming that “ces cas curieux ont beau être attestés par les anciens, on ne saurait les prendre au sérieux” [it is no good calling upon the ancients to testify to the authenticity of these strange cases—they cannot be taken seriously) (Langages, p. 159); Marichal believes that Rabelais is merely satirizing popular credulity (“Commentaires,” p. 195); Michael Screech accuses Rabelais of “teasing his readers” with the prodigy list, Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 448.

5. François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Pierre Jourda, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1962), 2: 21. All further references will be to this edition and will be noted in the text by page number. Translations into English are my own.

6. Works and Days, 289.

7. Cave offers illuminating insights into Rabelais's use of Hesiod's topos in “Reading Rabelais,” pp. 79-82.

8. More specifically, “hausser le temps” meant “to spend or passe away the time in quaffing, swilling, carousing” according to Randle Cotrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611; rpt., Columbia, S. C.: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1950), n. pag.

9. In the Tiers Livre, the need to satisfy material appetites before turning to spiritual matters is presented in a similar fashion: hunger is conceived as a noisy, turbulent, animal condition and freedom from hunger as lightening and uplifting (1: 455-56).