SOURCE: “Introduction: The Design of Rabelais's Christian Humanist Epics,” in The Design of Rabelais's Pantagruel, Yale University Press, 1991, pp. xiii-xviii.

[In the following excerpt, Duval argues that Pantagruel must be read in the historical and ideological contexts of its origin, noting the work's unified structure and heavy reliance on Christian humanism.]

What literature has in common with painting, according to Horace, is that some poems, like some paintings, are best judged when examined attentively at close range, others when viewed more globally from a distance:

Ut pictura poesis: erit quae, si propius stes,
Te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes.

[AP 361-62]

Horace's point is simply that in judging large works—whether paintings or poems—the critic must not focus myopically on the weakest parts but must broaden his view to consider the overall effect of the whole. If Homer occasionally nods, he may be excused by the vast, epic proportions of his poems (AP 347-60).

But the distinction between microscopy and macroscopy is useful for interpreters as well as for judges of literature. In coming to terms with large and complex works we are often tempted to stand too close, so to speak, and to scrutinize small details without stepping back to consider their place and function within the larger picture of the whole. The result can easily be an imperfect sense—or a partial sense, or even no sense at all—of what the work is all about.

The long narrative works of François Rabelais have suffered perhaps more than those of any major author from this kind of interpretive microscopy. Even the best of readers tend to focus on individual episodes and details isolated from their context and to arrive at a general view only indirectly and inductively by selecting, combining, and interpreting at will a limited number of smaller parts.

This tendency is perhaps understandable. Many superficial aspects of Rabelais's books—their apparent spontaneity and exuberance, their comic truculence, their inconsistencies and internal contradictions, their episodic structure, their radical open-endedness—conspire to suggest to postclassical readers not a coherent and ordered composition but something akin to those grotesque composite images described by Horace, which start as a beautiful woman and end as an ugly fish—ridiculous, incoherent forms like the dreams of a sick man in which neither the beginning nor the end corresponds to the middle:

… cuius, velut aegri somnia, vanae
Fingentur species, ut nec pes nec caput uni
Reddatur formae.

[AP 7-9]

From these appearances has been derived an implicit but almost universal assumption that Rabelais's books are not really works at all but rather miscellaneous “texts,” Menippean grab bags of discrete, tenuously related episodes whose order and number could be modified without significantly altering the meaning of the whole.¹ Such a view would seem to justify and even to require a myopic focus on its individual parts.

The present study takes its point of departure in the conviction that this widely held assumption of formal incoherence is mistaken and that, superficial appearances and received ideas notwithstanding, each of Rabelais's books is a complete, whole, and meticulously ordered work in the fullest sense of the word. As such each belongs squarely in Horace's second category of paintaings and poems that “te capia[n]t magis … si longius abstes” (AP 362). This is not to suggest that careful attention to the smallest details is not indispensable for an adequate understanding of Rabelais's books, but rather that every episode and virtually every detail is subordinated to a coherent, overarching design that must be clearly apprehended before any particular episode or detail may be properly understood.²

By design I mean not the kind of thematic unity or general coherence of vision that might be inferred from the sum of a work's several parts, but rather a master plan that appears to have preceded and governed the composition of each of Rabelais's books, that is meant to be discerned by the reader even before he has arrived at an understanding of any single episode, and that functions as a guide toward a proper understanding of not only the whole work but also its constituent parts. Consisting in an overall structure and not in the words that fill the structure out, it exists independently of the local, textual ambiguities that have elicited so many divergent interpretations and, transcending them, provides the stable perspective from which all such ambiguities may be properly understood. Design in this sense is thus simultaneously an intention, a structure, and a built-in hermeneutic device. It is a sure and indispensable guide to correct interpretation that reveals, through form, the meaning and most profound intentions of the work.

In keeping with this fundamental conviction I have undertaken in this study to read the first of Rabelais's Pantagrueline books not as a mere text or collection of unrelated texts but as an integral, organic work informed by a clear and meaningful design. To this end, rather than proceed from a close examination of a few parts to a more general interpretation of the whole, I have deliberately begun with the Horatian long view, moving closer to examine problematic episodes and details only after their place and function within the overall design have been clearly understood.³

But design as I have found it to function in Rabelais's works is not simply a matter of pure, universal form that is immediately obvious and intelligible to all readers of all times. As the expression of an intention it involves a point of view and a complex of opinions and judgments relating to a specific historical moment, and an ideology unique to a culture very remote from our own. As a built-in hermeneutic device it is a culturally determined means of communication fashioned to be deciphered by a specific group of readers whose experience with literature and habits of reading were radically different from those of readers today. This being the case, the macroscopic perspective necessary to perceive an overarching design must constantly be supplemented by an even broader historical perspective, without which any such design would remain largely unintelligible. I have therefore made every effort to bring to the Pantagruel as much as I could of the knowledge, beliefs, experience, expectations, and habits of mind that it presupposes in its readers, so as to respond to its design in something approaching the way it was fashioned to make its readers respond.

I have found two general contexts to be particularly important in this regard. One is strictly literary and involves the traditions and the conventions that determine what we would today call its genre. Genre is of course intimately related to questions of design, for not only is the structure of a work determined in large part by its genre but, as Alastair Fowler has argued, genre is itself an “instrument of meaning” in that literary works actually produce meaning through deliberate “modulations or departures” from recognizable but constantly evolving generic norms (Kinds of Literature, esp. pp. 22-23). If this is so then it is obviously a matter of extreme importance not to mistake the generic pretensions of works whose overall design and meaning we wish to understand.

To read Rabelais's books as “novels,” “comedies,” “satires,” or “chronicles,” as modern readers have variously done, is to expect from them a design they do not or cannot possibly have. Worse yet, it is to force them to work within a framework of norms and conventions very different from those they are specifically designed to modulate, and consequently to overlook their specific literary meaning while reading into them an entirely inappropriate one. Even read as “romances” these books are bound to be seriously misunderstood. Their utter disregard for women and love, and especially their strict unity of hero and action, clearly set them apart from a genre whose most characteristic features are courtly eroticism and multiple plots and heroes.⁴

All of Rabelais's works identify themselves in one way or another—through various patterns, allusions, echoes, and what Fowler calls “generic signals”—as epics of a kind. This is most obviously true of the Pantagruel. From the very beginning this self-proclaimed sequel to a burlesque Arthurian epic constantly points to its own epic pretensions. Its subject is a single heroic action performed after due preparation by a single epic hero. And as we shall see the Pantagruel as a whole, like all of Rabelais's books, conforms not only to many of the most immutable characteristics of epic but even to a strict Aristotelian definition of έποποιία. Its story is constructed “dramatically around a single piece of action, whole and complete in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end, so that like a single living organism it may produce its own peculiar form of pleasure” (Poetics 1459a 23.1). And despite its episodic structure it is not so long, so complex, or so rich in the “reversals, discoveries, calamities,” or “diverse episodes” permitted to epic that it cannot be “perceived as a whole in a glance, from beginning to end” (1459b 24.2, 5, 7).

In short, the Pantagruel demands to be read primarily as an epic, inscribed in the heroic tradition illustrated by the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and later chansons de geste like the chronicles of Turpinus and Fierabras. Only by doing so will we be able to discover the full implications of its design and the new meaning it generates by modulating, innovating, transforming, and subverting the norms and conventions of the genre.

The second context I have found to be indispensable for a proper understanding of the Pantagruel's design is the more broadly cultural and intellectual one commonly referred to as Christian humanism. By qualifying Rabelais's epic as “Christian humanist” from the outset I mean to identify not so much the ideology that it is designed to express—for this is a matter to be proved, not taken as a point of departure—but simply the matrix of texts and attitudes within which the book is designed to function, to which it constantly alludes, and through which it signifies by a process we today would call intertextuality.

For although Rabelais obviously wrote his first book to be understood and enjoyed by virtually everyone, it is equally obvious to anyone who has read Rabelais with some degree of attention that he designed all his books to be understood and enjoyed most fully by the small community of readers who knew the languages of humanism and could recognize tags, allusions, and resonances from classical, biblical, and modern humanist texts. If we were to read the Pantagruel as aliens, ignorant of the languages it speaks and unfamiliar with the humanistic culture it shares with the readers to which it was principally addressed, then we would certainly misunderstand its nature as a work and misinterpret the most profound implications of its design, whatever else we might be able to make of the words on the page of the “text.” Only to the degree that we are able to enter the community of intended readers by bringing to the Pantagruel the Christian humanist culture it presupposes in us will we be successful in making sense of its design.

Here a word of caution is perhaps in order. By setting aside the comic and “popular” aspects of the Pantagruel to focus almost exclusively on its humanistic erudition and its higher, serious meanings, the following pages are likely to give the impression of an arbitrary preference for high culture over low, or of an a priori judgment that the importance of the book lies more in its humanism than in its humor. This is not at all the case. It is rather an inevitable consequence of the fact that the fundamental, overarching design of the Pantagruel is revealed through elements whose humor is extraneous to their function of revealing design, that the design itself is by nature neither serious nor comic but rather a neutral structure and guide to interpretation, and that the primary meanings to which the design leads us turn out to be relatively serious meanings that can only be qualified as “Christian humanist.” In short, the boisterous, ribald, good-natured humor so characteristic of Rabelais's first book proves on inspection to be essentially extrinsic to its fundamental design, and therefore to the focus of this study.

This is not to say that the comic, the low, the obscene are somehow extraneous or irrelevant to the work itself. On the contrary, since my thesis is precisely that Rabelais's books are true works in which everything is strictly subordinated to a single overarching design and integrated into a perfectly coherent whole, then this study can fairly be said to fail unless it can demonstrate that the Pantagruel's most popular forms of expression and crudest forms of humor are not only compatible with the serious meanings to which its design leads us, but are necessary and integral to the work itself. Such a demonstration indeed forms a crucial part of my argument, but it cannot be undertaken until the design of the work and the meanings to which it points have been fully understood. For this reason and this reason alone I have put off consideration of the most obvious aspects of the Pantagruel until the end.

The reader's indulgence is therefore begged in advance for what may first seem a partial and tendentious treatment of the Pantagruel, or at best a backward approach to the most conspicuous aspects of the book. In the epilogue I have tried to show how the Christian humanism of the Pantagruel, far from residing only in serious meanings separable from and unrelated to the popular medium through which they are expressed, is an all-encompassing ideology that embraces both content and form, serious and comic, high and low, sacred and profane in a single coherent view, and that low style and coarse, popular humor are in fact crucial to its meaning in a way that shortcuts to such a conclusion would not have allowed us even to imagine.

My single aim throughout this book has been to determine as precisely, as accurately, and as completely as possible what the Pantagruel is about—what it is supposed to mean and how it means what it does. This is not the same thing as proposing to reduce an obviously complex work to a single valid meaning, or undertaking to exhaust all its possible meanings. My purpose has been rather to arrive at what I believe must be viewed as the primary meanings of the work—immanent, stable, fundamental meanings from which all others can be shown to derive and which establish clear limits within which further interpretation may legitimately operate. Having discovered these meanings I have not undertaken to explore the vast range of secondary meanings these generate and sanction. My conclusions about design and meaning are offered not as a last word on the Pantagruel but, on the contrary, as a first step toward a more complete and coherent understanding, and a foundation on which valid interpretation may continue to build. If design in Rabelais is everything I believe it is and have tried to show it is here, then there should be virtually nothing in this difficult and complex work whose presence cannot eventually be accounted for, whose relation to everything else cannot eventually be explained, and whose full range of possible meanings cannot eventually be understood and guaranteed, by its design.

Notes

1. For most readers this view is merely an unexamined, perhaps even an unconscious, assumption. For a few it has become an explicit article of faith. The most extreme view is perhaps that of Dorothy Coleman, who attempted to prove the thesis that Rabelais's books are “Menippean satires” in the strictest sense and asserted of the Tiers Livre, for example, that “within the framework provided by the beginning and end of the book, there is a pilling-up of episodes. … Grotesque parodies mingle with serious episodes; other episodes could well have come earlier or later in the book; it is written with the same formlessness as … Gargantua” (Rabelais, pp. 83-84).

2. Although virtually all studies of Rabelais deal in some way with what we might call the “coherence” of his books—whether in Weltanschauung, ideology, narrative technique, comic technique, language, tone, etc.—only two to my knowledge have systematically investigated something resembling what I am calling “design” here, both dealing exclusively with the Tiers Livre: V.L. Saulnier's Le dessein de Rabelais (1957), reprinted in Rabelais I (1983), and Walter Kaiser's Praisers of Folly (1963). These extremely valuable studies point the way to a more appropriate approach to Rabelais, even if their interpretations do not always stand up under scrutiny. By contrast even the most useful and influential studies of Rabelais—those of Abel Lefranc and Lucien Febvre, M. A. Screech and Gérard Defaux, Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Jeanneret, François Rigolot and Terence Cave—are, in spite of the light they shed on Rabelais's meaning and manner, characteristically fragmentary and inductive in their approach (i.e., “microscopic” in the neutral, purely Horatian sense).

3. One could reasonably object that perception of the whole cannot precede at least a provisional interpretation of the parts, and that it is precisely this impossibility that makes poesis fundamentally different from pictura. Because pictura is a spatial medium, we can easily perceive the overall design of a painting at a glance, even before identifying a single figure in it. But because poesis is to a considerable degree temporal, we must encounter each part of a poem serially before discerning the larger design that informs it.

   Without denying the truth of this observation or wishing to simplify the complex dialectic known as the hermeneutic circle, I would answer only that the priority I am granting to design over detail is one not of perception but of perspective. The macroscopic approach would consist in arriving as quickly as possible and by any reliable means at a complete sense of a work's overarching design and then proceeding to solve local problems of interpretation in the manner that the design requires. Theoretical difficulties with such an approach are only theoretical. In the case of Rabelais's works, the overarching design is remarkably easy to discern, provided only that we cease to assume that none is there to be found.

4. It is of no consequence that the term epic was not yet in use in Rabelais's time, nor that the categories epic and romance had not yet been differentiated and defined by literary theorists, nor that the two modes were indistinguishable in many late medieval romance epics. Rabelais and his readers knew Vergil's epic intimately and considered it a model of the genre. They also knew the basic “rules” of the genre, not only from Horace's ubiquitous Epistola ad Pisones but also from Marco Girolamo Vida's detailed discussion of Vergilian epic in book 2 of the De arte poetica (dedicated in 1527 to the French dauphin François, son of François I). They even had direct access to the recently rediscovered (if not yet critically important) text of Aristotle's Poetics, which had been available in Giorgio Valla's Latin translation since 1498, in the Greek original since 1508, and in Alessandro de’ Pazzi's soon-to-become standard bilingual edition since 1536 at the latest (dedicated in 1527, first printed in 1536). Even without the aid of critical labels and categories, Rabelais's readers were thus capable of identifying the Pantagruel and its sequels as something quite distinct from a roman, as different from Mélusine and the Orlando furioso as is the Aeneid from the Aethiopica.

   On the availability of Aristotle's Poetics in Rabelais's time see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism, 1.349-423, and Cranz, A Bibliography of Aristotle Editions. On the eventual elaboration of a theoretical distinction between epic and romance, begun in the year following Rabelais's death with the quarrel between Giraldi and Pigna and continued to the end of the century through Tasso's quarrel with Ariosto, see Weinberg, 1.433-51 and 2.954-1073. For a parallel development in France, see Fumaroli, “Jacques Amyot and the Clerical Polemic Against the Chivalric Novel.”

A Note on Texts And Abbreviations

The text of Rabelais used here is that of the Oeuvres complètes edited by Pierre Jourda and published in two volumes by Garnier. Quotations from Rabelais's major works will be identified in the text by title, chapter, and page number in this edition (see list of abbreviations below). Quotations from minor works will be similarly identified by volume and page number in Jourda. I have occasionally modified Jourda's text (which for the Pantagruel is based on the “definitive” edition of 1542) to reflect readings from earlier editions. All such modifications are clearly identified as variants and, in the case of 1532 readings, accompanied by chapter and page numbers referring to V.L. Saulnier's edition of the editio princeps. In the rare instances where the Jourda or the Saulnier texts are faulty I have emended them to conform to the appropriate original edition. For variant readings I have relied on the unfinished critical edition of the Oeuvres begun in 1913 by Abel Lefranc and his team.

The text of Erasmus's works is that of the Clericus edition of the Opera omnia. Because the superb North-Holland edition, which is destined to supersede that eighteenth-century classic, is not yet complete, simplicity and the reader's convenience seemed to demand that all references be made to the Clericus edition and identified simply by volume and column number in the “Opera.”

Quotations from the Bible generally follow the text of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) but depart from it whenever necessary to reflect the meaning of the text Rabelais and his readers knew and used—most often that of the Latin Vulgate, occasionally that of the Greek New Testament and Septuagint, and in a few cases that of the Hebrew Bible. I have indicated all such departures from the RSV in brackets.

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Greek and Latin literature are from the editions of the Loeb Classical Library. Wherever textual detail is crucial to my argument I have quoted instead from sixteenth-century editions that would have been easily available to Rabelais and his readers, indicating my sources in the notes and bibliography. In the case of some Greek words this has meant quoting from a standard Renaissance Latin translation. All translations from Greek and Latin into English are my own.

Principal abbreviations used throughout these pages are the following:

AP: Ars poetica

BHR: Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance

CL: Cinquiesme Livre

ER: Etudes Rabelaisiennes

G: Gargantua

HN: Historia naturalis

Met: Metamorphoses

P: Pantagruel

PL: Patrologia Latina

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

QL: Le Quart Livre

RHLF: Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France

RQ: Renaissance Quarterly

STEFM: Société des Textes Français Modernes

THR: Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance

TL: Le Tiers Livre

TLF: Textes Littéraires Français