Reading List 11: Gargantua and Pantagruel

It’s another level of textual self-awareness, I think—though usual caveats apply about not knowing what came in between. If Aethiopica is aware of itself as text, and willing to depend on textuality for some of its effects, Gargantua and Pantagruel turns on the realization that a bunch of other stuff is also, or can be taken as, text: into the novel we can incorporate the throat-clearing of a scholar, the legal arguments of feuding dukes, a theological sign-language. And, irresistibly, any number of bodily functions, perhaps especially including those normally deemed gross.

Rendering all of this stuff into text—into onomatopoeia, portmanteau, pun, etc—gives the projects an unusual new texture that I think we can rightly read as experimental in the modern sense: it demands a new method or system of reading. For Heliodorus was, I think, mainly asking us for a bit more short-term-memory storage within the frame of a still-fairly-well-ordered narrative praxis—we were doing an absurd number of layers, and a much more distant set of recurrences, but still mainly hearing about events within (not dead-centered, but within) the Aristotelian parameter: very good people, doing high-stakes things, under some kind of pressure, with some ultimately legible pro-social agenda underneath.

Bring that frame to Rabelais and I think you’ll find things unraveling a little: it marks out an original improbability in the very positioning of its protagonists, who aren’t just ‘unusually hot’ or ‘unusually virtuous’ but actually giant, so large that they can demolish buildings with their hands, that their piss drowns armies, that their farts birth entire tribes. Plainly we are in a geography other than ‘the kind of thing that would happen.’ And we’re not—very definitively not—in a drama of recognition and reversal of the kind that has animated a lot of prior plots.

That’s partly because Rabelais, as a writer, is just incredibly present in the scene-to-scene prose in a way that we haven’t seen much of so far. The clear joy in the project is in the comic execution of each independent scene, in what he discovers himself able to do with stock occurrences like ‘a birth’ or ‘arriving in town’ or ‘a debate’ or ‘a battle.’ While Ovid felt at times like the world’s longest flash collection, Rabelais feels something like a 24-hour improv show by an incredibly gifted set of (sophomoric) sophomores—the audience shouts a normally-occurring thing, and the players set about figuring out how many farts, and how many barrels of wine, can be squeezed thereinto. It’s an edge or facet of novelness we haven’t seen too much of yet—this irruptive capacity, the joy of textual or actual presence escaping from the purposive architecture and thereby expressing that presence itself is a purpose.

But just as the occasions of Rabelais’ scenes can seem like so many points of stock departure, so too does the recurrence of those occasions seem to gesture at a larger and consistent purpose.  Both these first two books begin with the gigantic birth, continue through episodes of gigantic education and correction, culminate in gigantic war, and end with something kinda-sorta like gigantic utopia. This utopia’s funny: it occurs within the literal (Pantagruel’s mouth) or figurative (Gargantua’s establishment of the abbey) body of the giant, protected by his fierceness and savagery. Within that protection it’s less-ruled than other societies are—while the giant himself had to undergo an arcane process of education, had to master obscure codes of law or theology, the utopias he establishes are characterized in large part by the irrelevance of those codes. They’re lands of do what thou wilt, the giants’ synthesis of education and organic virility establishes a world where education isn’t necessary. Giant as vanguard.

And so there’s a delightfully polarized concentricity in these books. They proceed by eruption—every chapter offers the same shape, in which the ridiculous vitality of the titular giant overwhelms the normal codes of habits of whatever scene they’re in. Then, though, they accumulate to confinement—while the giant’s too big to be held by any occasion, he’s ultimately a social being and over the course of the book still ends up moving through a conventional set of scenes, within which the giant fills normal functions by excessive means. He does settle the debate, does win the war, though not in the way a smaller actor might. But they conclude in liberation—having successfully discharged all of these conventional roles, the giant establishes a Utopia seemingly free of those same conventions. Rabelaisian vitality breaks rules from page to page, follows them from chapter to chapter, and obliterates them from book to book. An interesting stack for future fictions—one that Joyce et al have found a lot of action in. Same shape in Ulysses, and maybe this is the secret convention huddled under some experimentation: disobedient paragraphs/textual foreground, obedient chapters/narrative middleground, absolute reversal in the final teleology.

Also, a shape available to quick historicization: the two poles of the books seem to be the vitality of the protagonists (incl. Rabelais himself, as the prose stylist) and the propriety of the church and academy (incl. Rabelais himself, as very plainly a well-capitalized academic). Piss v. pater noster. Easy—without knowing much of the history at all, interpretation is fiction—to imagine Rabelais writing at a time whose key contradiction was between the abstracted, linguistic authority of church and law and the incredibly smelly and embodied experience of everyday life. The Rabelaisian citizen must negotiate between his simultaneous possession of reason and shit. His text includes poetry but also those original throat-clearings, coughs, neologisms. How can two codes speak to each other? Which should predominate? On the one hand—do what thou wilt—it seems quite clear that Rabelais sides with the organism itself, in all its hedonism and fluid productivity. But it’s a bit more complicated than that, right? For the giants must do the academy, and must win the war, before establishing the utopia. Somehow the rules are an essential station on the way to rulelessness; doing what thou wilt after learning latin hits different than before.

There’s also a subject thing happening: the giants distinguish themselves here by being individual agents empowered at the rough midpoint between the humans and gods who populated earlier novels. They lack the prophetic and supernatural powers of the deities as such, cannot englamour or arrest anyone—but their natural power is greater than almost anyone we’ve seen. In particular they have the power to revise or destroy the world around them: Achilles and even Odysseus could always prevail in individual instances, but the basic frame of their reality wasn’t so responsive to their efforts. Here G and P can disassemble churches, structures, institutions—replacing them with something better. Easy to historicize this, too—to imagine a Rabelais, gifted in his time but not quite giant, objecting to the shapes and patterns of contemporary rule, frustrated to see the mereness of his own appetites and interventions against the inertial apparatuses of state and church, dreaming of a greater vitality that could make the change he wished for. Lukacs might say: here is the last dream of deed as adequate, a fairy tale about a single revolutionary. In the earnestness of its wishing, perhaps, it reveals the impossibility of its reality. A time dreaming of utopias established by giants—a type of caesarism, yes—is a time of desperation. It grasps at two guttering faiths: in its own capacity to be transformed, and in its citizens’ capacity to be the ones who so transform.