Gargantua.

For more than thirty years, from an early article on the date of Rabelais's birth to the recent Rabelais et le comique du discontinu, Floyd Gray has enriched Rabelais criticism with a number of important studies bearing more often than not on the stylistic aspects of Rabelais's novels as well as the author's conception of the very act of writing. With this new edition of Gargantua, Gray lays further claim to our gratitude by publishing a remarkably faithful transcription of Rabelais's text at a particularly interesting stage of its evolution, representing as it does the very last version that Rabelais may have had occasion to revise and correct before its publication.

That the project is only partially successful is due in large measure to an introduction whose purpose is to shed light on a number of problems related to Rabelais's life and to the challenging nature of the novel at hand, but which in fact raises more questions than it was meant to answer. Was it wise, for instance, to devote more than four pages out of a total of twenty to the ultimately insoluble problem of Rabelais's birthdate, especially since the date of 1483 seemingly favored by the author at the close of a somewhat labored argument is used to bolster the (surely debatable) conclusion that Rabelais's novels, from first to last, read like the works of an old man ("son oeuvre est l'enfant & sa vieillesse plutot que de sa jeunesse" [9])? Much of what is said of Gargantua risks striking the reader as either self-evident, highly debatable, or unexpectedly baffling. Need we be told that the games played by the young giant "n'ont aucune valeur educative" (20)? Is the relatively unimportant role played by Gargantua in the Picrocholine War really to be explained in terms of the laws governing a comic work (20)? What point is there in deploring that the Picrocholine War "n'aboutit a rien, si ce n'est [sic] la dafaite de Picrochole" (21)? The author's emphasis on matters of style and in particular on the intermingling of the various stylistic strands in the fabric of the Rabelaisian text is more than welcome, but the discussion of the text's discontinuities is itself likely to leave an uncomfortable impression of discontinu which is further aggravated by excessively frequent lapses into unacceptable, or at the very least ungainly French: "Tousles deux episodes" and "l'effet possible qu'il pent avoir" (19), "Peu d'auteurs ne demandent plus de gloses, ne suscitent plus d'interpretations" (24); "jusqu'a en prescrire et surveiller sa presentation" (25), among too many other possible examples. The introduction should obviously have received much closer editorial attention before finding its way into print.

Readers in search of a clearly focused, even-handed exposition of the problems raised by Rabelais's Gargantua should probably be advised to look elsewhere. But students seeking a reliable text, carefully annotated for linguistic difficulties and literary or historical allusions, will find much that is useful in Gray's edition. They will not fail to appreciate, in particular, the effort to situate each important episode in the context of the most recent studies on the subject, even if they were to take issue with the editor's tendency to give precedence to problems of style over problems of meaning. And above all, thanks to the editor's determination to reproduce the text exactly as it appeared in 1542, both students and scholars alike will be grateful for the opportunity to cast a glance at the fascinating peculiarities of Rabelais's - or his printer's - spelling, mise en page, and punctuation.

BRUNO BRAUNROT Georgia State University