A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  A moment’s reflection will suffice to see that there was a basic tension inherent in “humanism,” at any rate, as it presented itself to Christians in the early modern period. Protagoras, who first said that man is the measure of all things, is also on record as saying that we can know nothing certain about the gods. This was not a position that was fully comfortable for any sixteenth-century Christian to take without reservation. Rabelais makes fun of many contemporary Christian institutions, including the papacy, monasticism, the mass, indulgences, fasting, even the scriptures (through parody), but of course this does not mean that he failed to understand himself as a Christian. Rabelais too, then, could be expected to feel some of the discomfort here, because surely Christianity requires a view that is not anthropocentric, but theocentric. Belief in transcendent “truths” that are not clearly expressible in human language and the striving to lead an immortal life, which is so firmly rejected by Pindar, are a constituent part of it. That the Christian scriptures can lay no claim to literary elegance and are written not in high-status “pure” Attic, but in semi-literate Koiné was a problem for educated Christians from the start, but it becomes a special problem for humanists in the Renaissance.

  The Renaissance humanists had their own clear version of divisio, and this applied also to literary genres. Serious genres, like epic or tragedy, require an appropriately serious form of treatment. They treat “high matters” (peace and war, the deaths of princes, grand politics) through the actions and speech of “high” personages (kings and heroes) who address each other in an appropriately polished, formalized, decorous form of speech. The ancient theorists recognized the existence of genres, such as comedy, that treat of the everyday doings of common folk, and here they permit nonpolished and nondecorous forms of speech and action. Thus, Athenian comedy treated the concerns not of mythic heroes (Herakles, Agamemnon) but of ordinary Attic citizens, even peasants, and tolerated a looseness in meter, a colloquialism in speech, and an avowed proletarianism in attitude and behavior that would have been considered impossible in a genre of greater standing and prestige such as, for instance, tragedy. And, of course, comedy did not just tolerate but gloried in the absurd, the inconsequential, the ridiculous in matters of plot and in forms of speech that were intended to cause the audience to laugh—that is exactly the sort of thing which constitutes the very substance of Rabelais’s books.

  A lack of dignity and standing compared to epic and tragedy was the price comedy paid for its relaxation of strict standards of decorum. Divisio of an extreme form was assumed to exist between tragedy and comedy: in the ancient world there was no known instance of a poet who had written both comedies and tragedies. So Athenians were used to seeing the god Dionysus in one play (Aristophanes’s Frogs) as a buffoon who beshits himself in fear on stage, asks for a sponge to clean himself up, and appeals to his own priest (seated on a special throne that is still visible today) for protection against one of the other characters, and then seeing him in another play (for instance, Euripides’s Bacchae) as a terrible and vengeful deity inflicting excruciating punishment on those who fail to worship him. These were, however, not just different plays, but plays in different genres. Their divisio took, then, a rather different form from that practiced at the court of Louis XIV or in a late-eighteenth-century salon.

  There are some signal difficulties with the received view about the respective “seriousness” of tragedy and comedy. “Serious” is used in two different ways. First, it can refer to a sober, deadpan mode of presentation. It can, however, also be used to refer to that which can, or even must, be taken account of, as opposed to that which can be safely ignored. Jokes, slapstick, and badinage are virtually by definition not “serious” in the first of these senses, but it does not follow that they cannot be “serious” in the second sense. Aristophanes’s treatment of the sophistic movement in Clouds is exceedingly droll, but it does not follow from that that it has no bearing on actual educational policy, or that it could safely be ignored. If Aristophanes can be construed as having made some “points” in his comedy that really need to be addressed, the fact that they are presented as, or in the form of, “jokes” should not disqualify them from consideration. Plato has Socrates say that the play created a prejudice against him that it was hard to overcome, and this, one might think, is another aspect of comedy should not be brushed off as “just a joke.” The authors of the Index also seem not to have taken all “comic” works as nugatory and negligible.

  In various places, in particular in the prologue to Gargantua, Rabelais specifically discusses how seriously his works should be taken. Like everything else in the human world, his book does not, as it were, itself stand in the light of its own transparent intelligibility, but requires an “interpretation.” He uses an image taken from Alcibiades’s account of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. Alcibiades compares Socrates to one of the figures of Silenus, which, he says, one can buy in the Athenian marketplace. These figures were like Russian dolls with a smaller doll inside: the outside was rough and crude, painted “with frivolous, merry figures,” but when one opened it, inside there was an attractive image of the god. Similarly, Socrates was (notoriously) physically ugly, gauche, apparently foolish and ridiculous, but, as we would say, his mind or soul, or spirit was beautiful, adroit, deeply serious, and sublime. This too is a kind of divisio: an “outside” in strict opposition to a contrary “inside.” Rabelais applies this concept to his own work by claiming that the exterior of his books may be grotesque, ridiculous, and uncouth, but they conceals within themselves something that is the exact opposite: hidden meanings and sublime, serious truths. Scarcely, though, has he made this distinction than he immediately undercuts it by saying that perhaps he was drunk when he wrote the book and did not intend any of the profound hidden meanings one might attribute to his work. But then, Rabelais adds in a further twist: Homer did not intend all the sublime, hidden truths later interpreters attribute to his work either. This does not, as it were, simply return us to the original point from which we started—namely, this looks like a trivial and frivolous work, and, in addition, was written while the author was drunk, so it can be ignored. Rabelais is not denying any “serious meaning” to his own work because it is comic but rather rendering problematic the whole original set of distinctions between surface appearance and hidden meaning and between “serious” and “frivolous.” It is not that nothing is “really” serious—not even Homer—but that the comic can also be serious.

  The above discussion is an instance of the fact that Rabelais is, to say the least, not keen on divisio except as a potential object of mockery. In one of the very first chapters of the first book in the series, Pantagruel, we are given a list of books in the Library of St. Victor. The individual titles, some in (more or less proper) Latin, some in deeply medieval dog-Latin, some in French, are in themselves mostly absurd, and the whole is an incongruous and disordered juxtaposition of works on completely different topics: books on alchemy, military matters, law, the art of living (one volume is titled The Art of Farting Discretely in Public), theology, and cookery all jostle together amicably. Rabelais also takes aim at one of the central religious institutions of the Middle Ages, the monastery. Monastic life was explicitly founded on the division of the day into standardized parts, each with its own assigned task, and on the absolute obedience of each monk to “the rule” (usually some variant of the “rule” of St. Benedict). These rules are founded in the Christian notion of original sin. If the human will is aboriginally corrupt and thus, to the extent to which it asserts itself independently at all, sinful, then one way forward is blind obedience to a set of established rules. As Benedict himself writes in chapter 7 of his Rule: “We are prohibited from doing our own will.” The more perfect and more abject my obedience, the closer I can hope to get to a state of complete abrogation of my own will: I read the sixty-sixth psalm at Lauds because that is what is prescribed by the Rule, not because I have decided on this. By slavishly following the Rule
, it is not (really) I who am acting, rather the Rule is acting (through me).

  In stark contrast to this, in Thélème, the utopian “(anti)monastic” community described in Gargantua, there is no fixed division of the day into parts for antecedently specified activities, but what activities take place are decided “according to what is fit and opportune.” In fact, “their whole life was ordered not by laws, rules and regulations, but according to their own volition and free will,” and there are no rules. Or rather, the only rule is the anti-rule “Do as you will”—essentially the advice given by Pantagruel to Panurge in the Tiers livre. This trust in the human will is perhaps related to certain humanist concerns and themes, but Rabelais’s insistence on the inherent indeterminacy of definitive interpretation introduces a skeptical note.

  Rabelais, then, shared with the other members of the humanist movement a contempt for scholasticism in all its forms and for medieval educational practices and wanted to replace them with new humanist paideia, was deeply suspicious of “superstitions,” and valued very highly “philanthropic” benevolence, such as that which is increasingly shown by Gargantua and Pantagruel. On the other hand, his works clearly exhibit an attachment to the Gothic world, which stood on the other side of the line the humanists wished to draw between themselves and the medieval past. One of the first and most obvious ways in which he differed from the humanists was simply that he did not write Pantagruel and its successors in Latin (as his admired models Thomas More and Erasmus would probably have done), but in a language that could not even by any stretch of the imagination be called a “pure” vernacular. The language is full not only of individual neologisms of the kind the humanists tried to avoid, but of several fully invented (imaginary) languages. Pantagruel and its successors display an enthusiastic engagement with the “medieval” world of wonders, marvels, and fabulous doings, and also with the distorted, disproportioned, and exaggerated. The main story concerns giants, who by their very size are out of proportion to the usual human measure. Also their size keeps changing: are they three meters tall? Five meters? One hundred meters? Their size seems to change to fit the requirements of the episode in question. If chapter 22 of Pantagruel is right in describing Pantagruel’s tongue as more than two leagues long, then “pissing a full chamber-pot,” as he is said to do in chapter 20 of Gargantua, is not only unimpressive, but might suggest that he has some problematic physiological condition.

  Nor is the exuberance, energy, and celebration of excess, which are such important—and, to modern taste, endearing—features of Gargantua and Pantagruel, humanist virtues. Although certain central, apparently authoritative figures in the text occasionally preach moderation and self-restraint, the work itself tells a very different story. In fact the occasional praise of self-control or the “middle way” is presented as just one strand in the polyphonic clatter that constitutes the central reality of the books: sometimes it is more prominent, sometimes less, and sometimes it seems completely absent. Rabelais belongs, then, as much to the “Gothic” period and sensibility as to what is called the “high Renaissance”; even this distinction seems to lose its sharpness when applied to him.

  If the Gothic period is the past—albeit a past that deserves perhaps in part to be loved and appreciated—and if the Renaissance—in some sense a call for a return to some of the ideals of a yet deeper past—is Rabelais’s present, what of the future? The meaning of “modern” is contextual. The humanism that looked, and was, so “modern” in the 1520s, did not at all look very “modern” in the second half of the twentieth century. So where does “proper” modernity begin for us? Perhaps, following Virginia Woolf, in 1910? Or in 1989? There is of course no absolutely right answer, but for specified purposes some ways of breaking history down can be more useful than others. For the purposes at hand, I wish to suggest that the beginning of “proper modernity” would be the 1960s, both in what it succeeded in doing (initiating a certain relaxation of previously existing cultural and social norms) and in what it failed to do (achieve any kind of significant economic or political change). If, for the purposes of discussion, one accepts this, there are a number of ways in which Rabelais seems “properly” modern, especially with respect to some of the developments that characterize Western history during the four hundred or so years that separate his age from us. It is as if he represented an untraveled, but possible, shortcut from the 1550s to the post-1960s. It would perhaps have been a somewhat muddy and not always completely salubrious path. One need not overlook the dark shadows in Rabelais’ work—think of the pervasive misogynist elements in it—but then no one is foolish enough to expect a perfect model for human action in a set of sixteenth-century texts, and many would think it folly to expect it in any individual text or set of texts. In any case, the road we actually took through Wars of Religion, royal absolutism, capitalist original accumulation, colonialism, and our record of treatment of women, the poor, and people of color was not itself all that edifying.

  The main road to modernity diverges from the shortcut when the very briefly flourishing world of Thomas More, Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne comes to an end. All four of these figures exhibited an ability to accept a relatively high degree of uncertainty and ambiguity in human affairs. They all seemed to cultivate a mildly skeptical ability to distance themselves from, and laugh at, themselves and their own necessities. They all clearly appreciated forms of play in literature (and elsewhere) that are not resolved into seriousness and a grim acceptance of the status quo, and they were all willing to countenance the possibility of a collective human life not structured by an overwhelming centralized agency for using coercive force.

  Crudely speaking, one can call all these traits aspects of what Rabelais calls “pantagruelism” which he further defines at the end of Pantagruel as “living in peace, joy and health, always enjoying good cheer”; in the Tiers livre as “never taking in bad part anything one knows to flow from a good, frank, and loyal heart”; and finally, in Quart livre, as “a certain merriness of mind pickled in contempt for things fortuitous.” As the space within which pantagruelism can flourish is diminished, this whole world gradually withers away. Descartes, the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation), and Hobbes all, each in its own way, mark the transition, and one can see its effects in the more conformist aspects of literary works like Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

  Don Quixote depends on a hearty, down-to-earth, peasant realism. A windmill is a windmill, giants are giants. Windmills are not giants, and anyone who thinks they are is either simply mistaken or mad. Madness, like any defect, is inherently risible. The more persistently someone harms himself by pursuing mad illusions, the more risible he is. Don Quixote instantiates in an especially vivid way a particularly imperious will-to-power of the imagination. He will impose his imaginary reconstruction on reality, in spite of all resistance and no matter what the world’s real constitution is. Cervantes presents this as inherently backward-looking—a return to medieval ways of thinking and acting—as completely out of touch with the world, and as ludicrous. His novel also has one of the most dispiriting and disappointing endings in world literature: Alonso Quisano “comes to his senses” and is reinserted into the mundane village life it was his great glory to have escaped—as “Don Quixote”—by the sheer force of his own imagination and will. His reconciliation with and re-submission to the status quo (including the Church) seems a kind of willed conformism imposed from the outside by the author, who is eager to impose his own will on a Quixote who seems almost about to escape his control. Cervantes very forcefully reaffirms that sanity is sanity, madness madness, the Church the Church, and Quisano’s actions as “Don Quixote” irredeemably insane. The peasants who laughed were right all along.

  Some of Rabelais’s humor sometimes approaches this heavy-handed doltishness, but in general he keeps his distance both from any glorification of the monomaniacal interventive will and from the idea that the only alternative to that is conformity to the status quo. When Pantagruel tells
Panurge he should become “arbiter of his own thoughts” that does not mean he should impose his obsessions on whatever he encounters, as Quixote does, and his admonition to Panurge to know his own will without being deluded by self-love does not mean that he should make up a wholly new identity for himself and expect the world to conform to the will of this new person. Frère Jean’s devotion to the pleasures of eating and especially drinking may go “over the measure,” but this excessive vitality is also not anything like the Don’s willingness to call a windmill a giant in the interests of inventing a challenge for himself and reaffirming a completely delusional self-conception. Exuberance is one thing; an almost transcendentally overweening self-will something completely different. Quixote’s invented identity is by no means immoral in itself—the knight errant is a defender of the poor, the weak, the helpless—but there is still something about the kind of “modernity” the Don actually instantiates—the absolute, utterly relentless insistence that the world conform to my will—that cannot help calling to mind Cortez, the desperado who with a mere handful of other ne’er-do-wells obliterated the Aztec Empire in Mexico with exceptionally ruthless brutality.

  Rabelais had more recognition and toleration of ambiguity, and of a variety of different points of view between which the choice is not absolutely clear, than anything one can find in Cervantes’s novel. Real “play” is possible for Rabelais within the fluid, flexible, open-ended framework of meanings that constitute our life, and this play is rewarding in itself and can sometimes even be subversive of established structures without madness or the use of overt violence. Pantagruel began, as has been mentioned, with hermeneutics, an inexact and uncertain human enterprise if any is—What is the student from Limousin saying? How is one to understand the varying intelligible greetings of Panurge?—and the series of Rabelais’s books ends in the fourth volume with Panurge beshitting himself with fear, like Dionysus in Frogs. Unlike the perhaps foolish and cowardly, but unembarrassable god (being shameless is one of the advantages of being a Greek god) Panurge tries desperately to deny this evident fact. He lists sixteen different terms for “shit,” only to deny that any one of them correctly describes what covers his breeches and to claim implausibly that the substance in question is actually “saffron from Ireland.” A heroic (but also pathetic) attempt at “reinterpretation.” Readers will make up their own minds about this, but the work ends, or at any rate peters out, without anyone, whether another character or the author, making an authoritarian gesture that would impose a decision on the issue.