Words as Play
What meaning lies behind this nonsense? In this cup, brimming with the joy of lust and wine-worship, is there any wise thought? Rabelais has one of the fools in his book say: "We country buffoons are reckless men who sometimes, with a flick, dislocate words from their joints" (Book 5, ch. 7). Rabelais loved words, and though he had an inexhaustible store of them he invented more than a thousand others. Like Shakespeare he drew words from the crucible of every trade and occupation and from every kind of philosophical, theological and legal debate, and put them to use. He made lists of nouns, adjectives and verbs as if for the sheer pleasure of seeing them (Book 3, ch. 38), and in a kind of intoxication multiplied synonyms until he lapsed into ugly padding; this long-windedness was itself an old technique of French stage actors. This technique made Rabelais's wit so unlimited and uncontrollable that beside this flood even the jests of Aristophanes and Moliere look like trickles of drops.
His Coarseness and His Style
His verbal coarseness was another feature of that unstoppable flood. It was partly, perhaps, an inward reaction against the hypocritical asceticism of monks, partly the natural indifference of a physician to the various parts of the human body, partly a protest against the precise word-fastidiousness of pretentious scholars, and, finally, mostly an imitation of the prevailing custom of the time. There is no doubt that Rabelais carried this custom to excess, for anyone, after reading ten or twelve pages on the lower parts of the body and the details of bodily functions, grows tired and turns away in disgust. In fact the influence of classical literature had to last another generation before it could check this explosion of unrestrained speech and bring it under literary standards.
We overlook these faults, because Rabelais's style outruns the accounts of both author and reader. It is a style without pretension, unliterary, natural, simple and fluent, exactly the instrument suited to telling a long tale. The secret of the warmth and charm of Rabelais's writing lies in his broad imagination, the power of his pen and the clarity of his expression. He sees thousands of things that are hidden from our eyes. He records in memory the countless folds of women's clothing and the details of men's behavior and speech, mixes them through his whimsical imagination, creates composite elements, and sets them racing one after another in the crowded arena of his pages.
Borrowing and Originality
He borrowed from left and right, as was the custom of the time; but, with the justification Shakespeare also relied on, that whatever he took from others he presented in a better form, Rabelais took hundreds of morsels from the table of Erasmus's Adages, and also gained much from In Praise of Folly and the Colloquies. Years before Amyot opened that treasury of riches to literary thieves with his translation of Plutarch, Rabelais had appropriated nearly fifty items from its stock. From Lucian's Dialogues of the Gods and a story of Folengo's, in which a sheep drowns itself, he gleaned ideas; among the comedies of his time he chose the story of a man who bitterly regrets having cured his mute wife; and from the fabliaux and interludes left over from the Middle Ages in France he seized hundreds of points and jibes; and in describing Pantagruel's voyages he made abundant use of the reports of explorers of the New World and the Far East. In spite of all these thefts, no writer is so original; and only in the works of great men like Shakespeare and Cervantes can we find imaginary creatures such as Friar John and Panurge, with so much vitality and movement.
As for Rabelais himself, he is the true creation of his book, and his character is a combination of Pantagruel, Friar John, Panurge, Erasmus, Vesalius and a forerunner of Swift; in other words, a talkative, passionate being who breaks idols so as to worship life.
His Targets
Because he loved life, he sharply condemned those who made life less lovable. Perhaps he treated too harshly the monks who had not understood his humanist ideas. It is likely that one or two lawyers had scratched him, since we see him tearing their fur out of spite and warning his readers: "Remember this saying of mine: if you live six Olympiads and the lifetimes of two dogs longer, you will see these pious-seeming cats taking command of all Europe." But Rabelais lays his whip also on the backs of judges and scholastic philosophers, theologians, historians, travelers, wandering sellers of indulgences, and women. In the whole book there is hardly one sympathetic sentence about women; this is Rabelais's severest weakness, and the result, we must say, of his having lived for periods as a monk, a cleric and a bachelor, never earning their attention or friendship.
What Did He Believe?
Various groups have quarreled over whether Rabelais was Catholic, Protestant, freethinker or atheist. Calvin considered him an atheist; and Anatole France, a smitten lover of Rabelais, said of him: "My belief is that he believed in nothing." Rabelais at any time chose a new subject for his unrestrained, cynic-minded chatter. He mocked fasting, the church's trade in indulgences, officers of the Inquisition and the decrees of the pope, and delighted in describing which bodily parts are needed to reach the papal throne (Book 4, ch. 48). He did not believe in hell (Book 2, ch. 30). He agreed with the Protestants that papal rule did nothing but drain nations of their gold (Book 4, ch. 53) and that the cardinals of Rome spent their lives only in gluttony and hypocrisy (Book 4, chs. 58-60). He sympathized with the heretics of France, as when he says that Pantagruel did not stay long in Toulouse, because the people there threw their regents, "like red herrings," alive into the fire, an allusion to the burning of a scholar of law known as a heretic (Book 2, ch. 5). His intellectual agreement with the Protestants was limited to individuals who followed humanism; he spoke of Erasmus with great admiration and respect, liked Luther a little, but showed hatred toward religious rigor and the dogmatism of Calvin (the book's text is damaged here). He had no bigotry except bigotry against tolerance. Like the humanists, when he had to choose a creed, he preferred Catholicism, with its legends, art and intellectual rigidity, to Protestantism with its predestination, asceticism and intellectual rigidity. He repeatedly affirmed his faith in the principles of Christianity, perhaps out of caution (Book 3, ch. 13; Book 5, ch. 47). He apparently believed in the survival of the soul (Book 2, ch. 8; Book 4, ch. 27) but, in principle, preferred discussing the grosser matters to final causes. Farel called him irreligious for accepting the post of priest of Meudon, although in the eyes of both giver and receiver it was clear that the title was merely a pretext for earning a living.
Faith in Nature and Pantagruelism
Rabelais's true faith was in nature, and perhaps only in this did he, like his devout, believing neighbors, reveal his trust and credulity. He believed the forces of nature in the end reach absolute good, though they may take no part in the relations between man and fleas and bedbugs. Like Rousseau, and unlike Luther and Calvin, he believed in the goodness of human nature; or, like other humanists, he was sure that good education and a good environment produce good people. Like Montaigne he encouraged man to follow nature, but pretended that if calamities fell on human civilization through neglect of that rule, he would feel no pity for it at all. In describing the abbey of Theleme it seems that Rabelais advocated philosophical anarchism, but in reality his intention was to admit only the family-minded, well-educated and respectable, so that they would deserve to pass through the probationary stage of "freedom."
Rabelais's final philosophy is "the Pantagruelian way": goodwill and patient accommodation to nature and people, giving thanks for blessings and enjoying all of life's pleasures, submitting also to the unavoidable events and upheavals of the age and being content with whatever life finally brings. In one place Rabelais defines Pantagruelism as "a certain gaiety of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortuitous things" (Prologue to the Fourth Book). This saying combined the philosophy of Zeno the Stoic, of Diogenes the Cynic, and of Epicurus: bearing natural events with calm of mind, accepting all natural human tendencies and acts without shame or sense of defilement, and enjoying every healthy pleasure without ascetic restraint or religious remorse. Pantagruel "took all things in good part and interpreted every deed in the best sense; he neither vexed himself nor disturbed his peace ... for all the goods the earth contains ... are not worth that we should trouble ourselves, or throw our souls and senses into doubt and confusion over them" (Book 3, ch. 2).
We must not credit this body of thought with more Epicurean strength than it had. In fact what Rabelais wrote in praise of wine was more verbal than an addiction to drinking, for his contemporaries described him as a man of "open brow, kindly and handsome." The wine he praised was the wine of life. This same man, who professed or was known as a pioneer in wine-worship, sums up, in a sentence he puts in Gargantua's mouth, the greatest moral message for our modern world in ten words: "Science without conscience is nothing but the ruin of the soul" (Book 3, ch. 8).
Rabelais's Afterlife
France has cherished Rabelais above all her great writers, except Montaigne, Moliere and Voltaire. In the same century Etienne Pasquier called Rabelais the greatest writer of the age. In the seventeenth century, when manners stiffened under the pressure of braided clothing and wigs and observance of classical forms in literature became obligatory, Rabelais lost some of his place in the nation's memory; but even then Moliere, Racine and La Fontaine confessed they were under his influence; Fontenelle, La Bruyere and Madame de Sevigne loved him, and Pascal accepted and used his definition of the nature of God. Voltaire at first condemned Rabelais's harshness and roughness of expression, but in the end became his devotee. With the evolution of the French language Rabelais's works became nearly incomprehensible to French readers of the nineteenth century, and at present one might say that Rabelais is better known in the English-speaking world than among the French, because in 1653 and 1693 Sir Thomas Urquhart published translations of the first and third books, in a vigorous style full of rhetoric like the original. Peter Motteux completed that translation in 1708, and thanks to these two men Gargantua and Pantagruel became a classic in the English language. Swift, a man of the church, claimed a right in it, and Laurence Sterne found in it leaven for his own humor. It is one of those works that belong not only to the literature of a single country but to the literature of the whole world.