Enter Rabelais, Laughing.

Barbara C. Bowen. Enter Rabelais, Laughing.

Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. xv + 230 pp. $27.95. ISBN: 0-8265-1306-9.

In her brief assessment of current trends in Rabelais criticism, the author of this most recent study of the comic aspects of Rabelais's chronicles notes an unfortunate tendency among the recent crop of specialists to misunderstand the writer and his work by reducing the rich complexity of the Gargantua-Pantagruel to a single, impoverishing (albeit original) point of view, and by choosing to emphasize whatever they take to be Rabelais's message at the expense of the comic dimension of his book.

Enter Barbara Bowen, determined to restore the balance by reaffirming the many-faceted nature of Rabelais's work, and to bring to bear her vast knowledge of the French Renaissance upon what is for her -- and, it is safe to say, for the majority of readers -- the most important yet least studied aspect of Rabelais's text, namely its unparalleled ability to elicit laughter. A scholar rather than a critic both by training and conviction, skeptical of labels and new perspectives, the author hopes to explain "why Rabelais's intended readers laughed at his text" (11) by recourse to the historical context in which this laughter resounded, and whose absence, among other shortcomings, invalidates the "fundamentally unsatisfactory" studies devoted to the subject by such predecessors as Marcel Tetel (1964), Gregory de Rocher (1979), and most recently Colette Quesnel (1991).

The Rabelais that emerges from her attractively presented, vividly written, and carefully edited monograph is for the most part a rather orthodox figure: an essentially unambiguous humanist eager to communicate a number of important religious and humanist messages in a text belonging to different comic literary genres, and requiring to be read, for a full appreciation of its humor, in the context of his knowledge of classical and medieval literary tradition and of such professional disciplines as medicine and law.

In her attempt to reconstruct this context, the author begins with two somewhat overlapping chapters on the concept of laughter and its narrative and above all dramatic manifestations from the Chanson de Roland to the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, in an effort to define "the basic techniques of medieval and Renaissance laughter" (19), to "broaden the perspective of literature Rabelais probably knew" (67), and to revisit the perennial question of Rabelais's debt to his predecessors. While condemning herself, in so doing, to repeat much of what has already been said on the subject by others (and by herself), Barbara Bowen does manage to hold our attention with insightful remarks on a number of points: the absence of unanimous agreement among Rabelais's contemporaries that "rire est le propre de l'homme"; the reevaluation of Folengo's influence on Rabelais, seen here as much more essential than is commonly thought; the importance of festivitas (defined with characteristic forthrightness as "a joking attitude to lif e" on page 21) even for such otherwise serious humanists as Erasmus and Thomas More; the surprisingly low frequency of laughter among Rabelais's major characters, or the cruelty rather than the benevolence of that laughter in the rare instances when it is present at all.

Subsequent chapters are devoted in turn to "The Comic Humanist," "The Comic Orator," "The Comic Doctor," and "The Comic Lawyer." In the first of these, the author notes the inextricable "coexistence of wit with serious intent" (101) among the great humanists of Rabelais's generation, underscores the "earthy quality" of that wit in humanist facetiae and German Reformation satire, and reminds us, somewhat less relevantly -- since its relation to comedy is rarely brought out -- of the humanists' predilection for storing and displaying information for its own sake -- for copia in other words, or for what Barbara Bowen prefers to call "trivial pursuit." The following chapter offers a general introduction to Renaissance rhetoric "in order to discuss more specifically the rhetorical component of Rabelais's humor" (102), and focuses primarily on the character of Panurge as a comic embodiment of "the dishonest orator." Chapter 5 studies how "Rabelais's medical expertise is used to comic effect" (131) and notes in pas sing with surprise how little Rabelais has to say on the physiological and therapeutic aspects of laughter in a book clearly meant to have a therapeutic effect on its reader, before effectively debunking, in a subsection on "Comic Diet," the myth of the giants' gastronomic excesses, by showing how the impressive consumption of food introduced for comic effect is counterbalanced by the humanist's message of sobriety in this as in everything else.

As the author leaves the stage after a rather lengthy chapter on law and a brief envoi in which she reiterates her belief in the unambiguous nature of Rabelais's messages, the theatrical bent of his literary imagination, and the fundamentally reassuring quality of his laughter (even in the Tiers and the Quart Livre?), the spectators-as-readers are likely to be moved to applause for the breath and depth of the performer's erudition, and for the refreshing unpretentiousness of a scholar for whom "goofy" is a perfectly respectable critical term and whose authorities on laughter are more likely to be P. G. Wodehouse and Steve Allen than Bergson or Sigmund Freud. They may hesitate, however, to join wholeheartedly in the chorus of praise from colleagues quoted on the jacket of her book, for they may be left with the nagging suspicion that for all her erudition, her judicious mises au point, and the unaffected charm of her critical voice, the author has not managed to convince them of the validity of her underlying thesis. Thus, in a typical passage dealing with the Bridoye episode in the Tiers Livre, the author speaks once again of "the frequent necessity, when reading Rabelais, for detailed and lengthy explanation of specialized material before laughter becomes possible" (164). Must one really first decide whether Bridoye's legal references are proof of his legal learning (as argued by J. Duncan Derrett) or whether he found them in compilations rather than at their source (as claimed by M. A. Screech) before allowing oneself to laugh at one of the world masterpieces of comic writing? Here as in many other instances throughout the book, one can be forgiven for suspecting that erudition, no less than critical bias, can obfuscate rather than enlighten. Ultimately, what is surprisingly lacking in Enter Rabelais, Laughing, given the author's fundamental objective, is a chapter on "Rabelais the Comic Writer." Preferably written by an expert in textual analysis rather than a critic or a scholar, the chapter would seek to ex plain, whatever the legal, medical, rhetorical or other thematic constituents of the text, Rabelais's ability to move his audience to laughter, in the sixteenth century as well as in our own, by his masterful mise en oeuvre of his thematic material. In the pages devoted to specific episodes, in particular that of the Parisian Lady, Barbara Bowen clearly shows that she is qualified for such a task. But the chapter -- or rather the book -- on the unrivaled capacity of Rabelais's text to elicit laughter is yet to be written.