Francois rabelais: Critical Assessments.

The volume edited by Carron contains twelve articles distributed among three wittily titled sections: "Bones of Contention," "Marrows of Discontent," and "Medullaires." According to .the editor, we have here a coherent collection of up-to-date, interdisciplinary studies by "the essential core of Rabelais specialists" (x). Unfortunately, the book does not entirely live up to Carron's confident presentation of it.

If there were an essential core of Rabelais specialists (essential to whom?), it would surely include Demerson, Tournon, Weinberg, and several others not present in this book; it would probably not include Jean-Claude Margolin, a distinguished Erasmian whose reflections here on Erasmus and Rabelais are sensible but hardly new, or Michael J.B. Allen, whose dense, mysteriously titled piece tells us more about Plato, Ficino and Pico than about Rabelais.

Three articles strike a note of deja vu. Carla Freccero's bad-tempered rehash of her objections to Wayne Booth, with added references to Anita Hill, has no discernible relevance for Rabelais. Francois Rigolot's "The Three Temptations of Panurge" (83-102) repeats almost word for word his differently titled article in PMLA 109 (1994): 225-37; I don't find his Parisian Lady as a figure for the suffering Christ any more convincing on second reading. Edwin M. Duval's "History, Epic, and the Design of Rabelais's Tiers Livre" (121-32) is a shorter version of his piece on the same topic in Rabelais in Context (1993, 21-38), and its genuinely original contribution certainly bears repeating: the apparently unstructured Tiers Livre becomes a coherent anti-epic when read as an illustration of passages by Horace, Lucian and Monstrelet.

A number of contributions provide a pleasant read rather than striking new insights. Marc Bensimon relates Gargantua's "narcissistic" letter to his son, in Pantagruel, to the androgyne image in Gargantua and discussions of the androgyne from Leo Hebraeus to Michel Tournier. Raymond La Charite's "The Framing of Rabelais's Gargantua" (3-18) is a lively analysis of the book's two enigmas, though I don't quite see why the tennis-game enigma shows that Theleme "harbors a disquieting and deceptive inside" (15). Michel Jeanneret is once again preoccupied with problems of signs in Rabelais's text: how do we know what is a sign and what is not in the confusing transformation of medieval into Renaissance semiology? Richard Regosin provides thought-provoking reflections on the Tiers Livre Prologue as an instance of a writer explaining his writing.

Three articles have more substantive points to make. Gerard Defaux, in "Rabelais's Realism, Again" (19-38), tackles the perennial problem of the split between "ancients" and "moderns." (Twenty years ago I was often castigated for these terms, which seem, judging by this volume, to be now in general use.) Even if I cannot agree that Rabelais the poet predominates over the evangelist and humanist (29), I heartily endorse Defaux's insistence on the multiple levels of Rabelais's text, and on the importance of "gaming, laughter, and the creation of a universe by means of language" (32).

Thomas Greene, in "Rabelais and the Language of Malediction," asks why Rabelaisian comedy is paradoxically both healing and aggressive, and explores three possible answers. There is fascinating material here on the concept of writing as therapy, and on Renaissance attitudes to cursing, sorcery, medicine and monstrosity. Green declines to conclude, but his study opens up some intriguing perspectives.

The most satisfying article, to my mind, is Terence Cave's "Travelers and Others: Cultural Connections in the Works of Rabelais" (39-56). By relating often-studied episodes (the World in Pantagruel's mouth, Pantagruel's meeting with Panurge) to other chapters which have travel as a theme, Cave throws new light on all of them as illustrations of a central theme in Rabelais: the "mediation between learned culture and practical culture" (48). He states (almost understates) a conclusion on which less temperate Rabelais specialists could profitably meditate: Rabelais's text can not mean anything one wants it to, but neither do all its strands serve a unitary intended meaning (55).

If the editor's arrogant claims for this volume are only partially justified, it nevertheless contains much interesting material and several important articles.

Readers of Andre Tournon's book on Montaigne (1983) and of his numerous articles on Montaigne, Rabelais and other subjects, will not be disconcerted by En sens agile. Other readers may be, since like many brilliant minds Tournon can be original, stimulating, obscure and baffling - by turns or simultaneously. The book is largely a compilation of previously published articles, and this poses organizational problems; the Rabelais episodes Tournon sees as crucial, especially the abbey of Theleme and the final Enigma in Gargantua, Bridoye in the Tiers Livre, and the frozen words of the Quart Livre are discussed with varying emphases in different chapters.

Tournon has one explicit agenda: to provide a new interpretation of the Tiers Livre, and several hidden agendas, of which the most obvious are the defense of Saulnier and Duval, and the undermining, wherever possible, of Screech. On Panurge, the central character of the Third Book whose indecision about whether to marry or not provides the plot, Tournon claims that both traditional views are misleading. Panurge is neither the despicable antithesis of the Stoico-Evangelical hero Pantagruel, nor the admirable clown debunking the pretensions of the intellectual authorities he consults. Both giant and trickster are essential to the story, which is an intellectual adventure on the themes of regeneration and joyful liberty. The book is full of questions, but its main lesson is hope: "Bon espoir y git au fond."

This is an attractive thesis, and has the great merit of playing down personal relationships - which, I entirely agree, were not Rabelais's main concern - and putting the emphasis on verbal and intellectual play. Tournon makes some provocative suggestions, among them that Panurge's praise of debts shows Rabelais's anxiety about aspects of the new economy beginning to flourish in his time (chap. 2); that Duval's well-known proposal about the symmetrical structure of the Tiers Livre needs revision (chap. 3); that at the end of the book Panurge suddenly ceases to be a docile follower of advice and assumes direction of the action (chap. 6); and that the much-discussed excusing of Bridoye and his dice-throwing may contain references to the lawyers of Aix who abetted the Massacre of the Vaudois ordered by Maynier d'Oppede (chap. 6).

Tournon claims that these and other points are obvious, because Rabelais always provides markers (reperes) to show us how to interpret difficult passages. Unfortunately, not all readers perceive the same markers, and some of Tournon's conclusions seem to me unacceptable. I can't agree that Ulrich Gallet's harangue to Picrochole is a parody (chap. 1), or that it's unfair to accuse Panurge of philautie (chap. 3), or that Rabelais's two statements on man's free will are not reconcilable (chap. 7). But it would be a dull world if we all found the same markers in Rabelais, and whatever else he may be Tournon is never dull. He brings to his analyses of enigmas and games, asymmetry and mistranslation, Fanfreluches antidotees and Panurge's poem in lanternois, a quirky intellectual zest which I think Rabelais would have enjoyed. The "sens agile" of the title is a quotation from Rabelais, but it applies equally well to this book's author, whose mind is at least as acrobatic as that of his favorite subject.

BARBARA C. BOWEN Vanderbilt University