Rabelais, Renaissance, and Reformation: recent French works on the Renaissance.

The renaissance is protean, forcing US to fix it with descriptive labels or bracket it with interpretive structures in order to make any sense of it. Recent works on Rabelais - himself a shifting and many faceted figure - not only illustrate this tendency but also illuminate the need for new interpretative models of the French Renaissance. Whereas some of these works attempt to fix Rabelais with the "humanist/humanism" label, others attempt to bracket him with post-modern interpretative structures, generally blending phenomenology, critical theory, and structuralism. And whereas some of these works unwittingly reveal the poverty of their interpretive frameworks, others point the way toward a new one that takes Rabelais's own cultural milieu more seriously. After reviewing all these interpretations, I shall try to describe the nature of this cultural milieu, which is defined by the coincidence of "Renaissance" and "Reformation" in the sixteenth century. These conflicting forces account for the high degree of unease and anxiety that defines the French Renaissance and many of its cultural products.

Madeleine Lazard reveals all in the title of her work, Rabelais, l'humaniste (Paris: Hachette, 1993), which synthesizes recent Rabelais scholarship for a general audience. This kind of effort makes great demands on an author, who must be able to summarize and generalize judiciously. Unfortunately, Lazard is only partially successful. The opening section of the book, which attempts to place Rabelais in his cultural context, presents a hopelessly Whiggish view of Renaissance humanism as the triumph of critical thinking over medieval dogmatism, resulting in the "rediscovery of man, the reaffirmation of his dignity, the assertion of his freedom" (26). Of course, Lazard does not neglect Rabelais's evangelical side, but her version of Christian humanism reduces religion to the status of an adjective. The reform movement simply becomes an extension of Renaissance ideals into the spiritual realm.

Her Whiggish view of humanism, however, is more than redeemed by her excellent treatment of Rabelais's medical training and its influence. Here she breaks no new ground, but she does present a vivid picture of medical education in sixteenth-century France. Medicine forms one of the major tributaries of the Greek revival, and it creates one of the fundamental contexts for Rabelais's humanism. Closely following Roland Antonioli's Rabelais et la medecine (Geneva: Droz, 1976), Lazard nicely summarizes the role of medical learning and medical controversies in Rabelais's novel. Perhaps she should have written a book entitled, Rabelais, L'humaniste medical, for this more detailed approach might have provided a clearer portrait of Rabelais.

Marie Madeleine Fontaine explores some of the dimensions of Rabelais's medical humanism in her collection of essays, Libertes et savoirs du corps a la Renaissance (Caen: Paradigme, 1993). In "Quaresmeprenant: l'image litteraire et la contestation de l'analogie medicale," she analyzes chapters 29-32 of Book Four, concerning the internal and external anatomy of Quaresmeprenant - the personification of Lent - who rules as king of an island skirted by Pantagruel and Panurge in their voyages. These chapters show how Rabelais uses his medical humanism in the service of his evangelism - his Erasmian preference for the spirit rather than the letter of Christianity. In several long lists detailing the anatomy of Quaresmeprenant, Rabelais ridicules not only religious superstition but also medical learning.

The analogies in these anatomical lists are usually interpreted as examples of Rabelais's comic invention - "His lobes are like a gimlet [tirefond]," "His liver like a double axe," "His feet like guitars" - but Fontaine shows how they reflect contemporary medical learning, which relies upon similar analogies. Indeed, the anatomical descriptions in sixteenth-century medical texts are hardly less monstrous, often comparing parts of the body to everyday objects. These texts reveal uncertainty about the value of medical illustration (a relatively new technique) versus verbal description in the study of anatomy. Finally, Rabelais's lists - each of which is organized differently - reflect his familiarity with the competing schools of medical learning, which, by contradicting each other, leave medicine in a state of flux. Rabelais uses these controversies on two levels, as an instrument for poking fun at the Church and as the butt of his own joke about the vanity of medical learning.

Diane Desrosiers-Bonin also offers a more detailed treatment of the humanist-humanism label in her Rabelais et l'humanisme civil (Geneva: Droz, 1992), which attempts to reveal a neglected civic side of his humanism. Here she portrays "ethics" as the core of civic humanism. By ethics, she means "moral philosophy" as distinguished from "morality," which has become the province of religion. Our contemporary fusion of morality and religion, she claims, distorts our understanding of Renaissance ethics, which needs to be restored to its proper context. As a historian, I would be inclined to admire this goal, were it not that her claim is overstated, creating an issue where none exists.

This problem, though, is secondary to those inherent in the way she affixes the label of civic humanism to Rabelais. First, if civic humanism reduces to ethics, what happens to the role of rhetoric? She is not slow to answer this question: the humanists, following their beloved Cicero, equate eloquence with wisdom, and wisdom is the province of ethics. But then what about Rabelais's evangelical side? How does it get reduced to "ethics"? Again, she is not slow to answer: citing Pierre Charron, she describes ethics as a reflection of the divine light of reason. Her brand of civic humanism thus presents us with a tidy package, in which rhetoric and religion are wrapped up with - or, better yet, by - moral philosophy.

Humanism, however, is more a curriculum and a method of expression than an ethical system. Any attempt to reduce it to an underlying philosophy seriously distorts it. And any attempt to project Charron's fideism back almost three generations upon Rabelais does violence to both figures, ignoring the trauma of the thirty-year civil war that separates them. These criticisms notwithstanding, Desrosiers-Bonin does have some very illuminating things to say about the "doctrine" of Pantagruelism and about the organization of the novel as a whole - topics that make her book well worth reading. But her attempt to contextualize Rabelais ends up not taking his context seriously enough.

Rather than affixing him with traditional labels, Monique D. Cusset attempts to position Rabelais on an elaborate interpretive grid in her Mythe et histoire: le pouvoir et la transgression dans l'oeuvre de Rabelais (Paris: Guy Tredaniel, 1992). "Power" and "transgression" - this is Foucault country; but, it is situated within Ricoeur's hermeneutical realm of myth, which itself is embedded in the historical world of sixteenth-century discourse. In other words, Foucault's theme manifests itself in Rabelais's treatment of myth, which reflects contemporary discourse about power. Lest the reader be deterred by all this theorizing, Gusset explains her interpretive framework, and applies it to Rabelais, with admirable simplicity and clarity.

As her title indicates, Cusset is concerned with establishing the historical context of myth for Rabelais. Although Foucault develops the duality of power and transgression in his critique of bourgeois society, it may also be regarded as a universal characteristic of all cultures, manifesting itself in different ways at different times. On this account, Cusset is careful to ground her analysis of this duality in the theories and mythologies of power current in the sixteenth century. These form the backdrop against which Rabelais reworks the traditional repertoire of myths - concerning Creation, the Holy Grail, the Fall, the Flood, and so forth - in an effort to awaken the human spirit to its creative potential. In this effort, myth and humor complement each other, presenting a larger-than-life caricature of the world.

Let one example of Cusset's ingenious interpretation suffice, concerning her parallel between the Flood and Gargantua's pissing on Paris (108-9). In his Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), M.A. Screech places this comic scene in its historical context - the royal punishment of reactionary elements in Paris in 1533. Cusset, however, goes on to show that when Rabelais - who was then sympathetic to Francis I - parodied these events, he had natural recourse to the myth of the Flood, in which an all-powerful god/king punishes the transgressions of his subjects. Historical events thus receive not only comic but also mythological treatment, which portrays them in terms of the duality of power and transgression.

Ironically, Cusset's post-modern interpretation does more to contextualize Rabelais than the more traditional approaches of Lazard and Desrosiers-Bonin. Despite her attempt to ground myth in history, however, Cusset's Rabelais simply seems to offer a sixteenth-century variant on a general theme, an impression confirmed by her tabular conclusion arraying the topics of each book under the universal headings of "power" and "transgression." A more fully historical treatment of Rabelais would seek not only to reveal the events and/or modes of discourse underlying particular scenes in the novel but also to describe the specific cultural features that give the novel its distinctive texture.

In their respective collections of essays, both Frank Lestringant and Michel Jeanneret describe some of the cultural features that characterize the novel. Lestringant's Ecrire le monde a la Renaissance: quinze etudes sur Rabelais, Postel, Bodin et la litterature geographique (Caen: Paradigme, 1993) uses contemporary geographical themes to explore Rabelais's narrative structure. For example, in "Rabelais et le recit toponymique," he uses the conventions of sixteenth-century French travelogues to analyze Rabelais's narrative use of place names. That Rabelais plays with proper names in general is apparent on every page of the novel. Some of this play serves to anticipate the plot; for example, when ambushed by the "Andouilles" in Book Four, Pantagruel summons Colonel "Riflandouille," whose name presages the outcome of the battle. This use of names is a narrative dead end, for "Riflandouille" can do only one thing. Sixteenth-century travelogues, however, provide Rabelais with a model for a more open-ended use of place names, a model that he transforms for his own narrative purposes.

In the sixteenth century, the chief text on the relationship between words and things was Plato's Cratylus, concerning whether names derive from the essence of things or merely signify them by convention. Du Bellay maintained the latter in his Deffence et illustration de la langue Francoise, but even he allowed for the possibility of finding verbal "allusions" that - though they had no etymological basis - might be used to tie words to things, "poetically," as it were. This notion of allusive meaning found its way into travelogues, especially Charles Estienne's Guide des chemins de France (1552), which combines erudite and allusive explanations of place names. Estienne uses verbal allusion as a mnemonic device for recalling the features of a place one had passed trough.

According to Lestringant, Rabelais uses this means of keeping track of one's travels as a device for opening up the narrative, for creating in the reader the anticipation of a wide range of possible stories. Gargantua and Pantagruel both make overland excursions - they both, in Lestringant's phrase, "follow the Guide." But as they do so, they create new verbal allusions. For example, Paris is so named because Gargantua floods it with piss as a joke - "par ris."

In the manner of contemporary travelogues, Rabelais follows up this verbal allusion with a "learned" discussion of the name; and, in the manner of these travelogues, the allusion serves as a mnemonic device - indeed, Rabelais may be said to have left his indelible mark upon the city. But the very fact that he invented this allusion, and others like it, serves to open up the narrative and project it forward, toward other allusive possibilities inherent in the travels of these giants.

In his "L'Insulaire de Rabelais, ou la fiction en archipel," Lestringant moves on to consider a topographical reading of Book Four, which is about the westward voyages of Pantagruel and Panurge in search of the "Divine Bottle." The account of these voyages has a different texture than that of the overland journeys in the previous books, largely because a narrative that moves from island to island is "insular," in the sense that each stage of the account is separate. In a brilliant analysis of the ninth chapter, Lestringant describes how this type of narrative functions in a way analogous to a contemporary memory theater, in that it gives spatial representation to Rabelais's verbal play.

This play tends to be open-ended, but Lestringant's analysis of the ninth chapter shows how Rabelais uses topography and geometry to circumscribe the range of meanings. The moral content of the chapter becomes clearer as Rabelais moves from a general description of the island, the physiognomy of its inhabitants, and their strange mode of addressing each other to a specific account of what was going on in the different rooms of an inn at the close of the chapter. Here in these individual rooms, one finds a moral key that helps put the bizarre customs of the islanders in perspective. According to Lestringant, Book Four as a whole is characterized by the same general movement, from a cosmographical overview of the voyage to the topographical features of each island.

Although the insular narrative enables Rabelais to express his moral observations in an engaging form, his rendition of it was shaped by a geographical awareness that remained unconsciously Mediterranean. Rabelais's account of a voyage across the Atlantic is thus a palimpsest in which one can still see the Aegean archipelago. Indeed, Rabelais never escapes this archipelago in Book Four. Just as his characters do not find the Divine Bottle, so too he does not ascend from topography to cosmography - to an overview that would contain his verbal play, providing it with an overarching meaning.

Michel Jeanneret's collection of essays, Le defi des signes: Rabelais et la crise de l'interpretation a la Renaissance (Orleans: Paradigme, 1994) supplements Lestringant's in two ways. Whereas Lestringant describes the contemporary geographical consciousness that informs various parts of the novel, Jeanneret describes the contemporary hermeneutical problem that shapes the novel as a whole. And whereas Lestringant shows how the insular narrative defies reduction to a single moral view, Jeanneret shows how this irreducibility constitutes a distinctive hermeneutical strategy.

Jeanneret has arranged his essays topically in order to reveal and explore a Renaissance phase in the history of hermeneutics that lies between the medieval allegorical and modern philological phases. Biblical exegesis in the Middle Ages was concerned with four levels of interpretation: the literal meaning of a passage, its relationship to the teachings of Christ, its moral dimension, and its spiritual or eschatological significance. When applied to profane texts, this four-fold mode of exegesis encouraged allegorical interpretations, especially of pagan myths. Opposite the allegorical pole stands the philological one, which attempts to explicate texts by purifying them of scribal errors and establishing their historical context, both of which serve to clarify authorial intentions.

Between these two interpretive poles stands, according to Jeanneret, a Renaissance mode of interpretation that flourished briefly in the sixteenth century, before printing had secured the triumph of philology. This mode is distinguished from the other two because it challenges the reader to engage in a process of interpretation that is by nature indeterminate. The medieval allegorical mode, although polysemous, nonetheless specifies a given interpretation at each level of analysis; and the modern philological mode, although it frees the reader to render individual interpretations of a text, nonetheless does so within the fixed framework of authorial intention. Only in the sixteenth century was the very nature of interpretation called into question and explored for its own sake, thus presaging the post-modern interest in hermeneutics.

Rabelais is the emblem of this "crisis of interpretation," in which the multivalent nature of medieval allegory has broken down, revealing signs whose meaning is either obscure or inexhaustible. Jeanneret associates this development with the rise of Neo-Platonism and evangelism, both of which emphasize the mystery of a supreme being that cannot be circumscribed by logic or dogma. Rabelais's caricature of the institutional Church complements his parody of the allegorical mode of interpretation; both are targets of his humor because they anesthetize the human spirit with traditional answers to vital questions. In contrast to the reliance on tradition, Rabelais invites the reader to engage creatively in an interpretive process that seeks to accentuate the play of meaning in traditional signs, a play that loosens rigid intellectual structures, allowing new ideas to emerge.

Jeanneret's analysis of sixteenth-century hermeneutics goes a long way toward explaining the Renaissance love of paradox. It also gives greater weight to the mystical side of Rabelais's evangelism, in which Christianity is not subordinated to humanism. And it even acknowledges Rabelais's need to circumscribe by subtle means the play of interpretation, lest he run afoul of the Church and suffer the fate of his friend, Estienne Dolet. But in contrast to Jeanneret's fine analysis - or, perhaps, in addition to it - I would maintain that the very process of deconstructing the medieval allegorical system creates in Rabelais a deep desire for order, a desire motivated by more than fear of ecclesiastical censorship.

Madeleine Lazard unwittingly offers us an insight into this desire for order when she announces that the dates of Rabelais's life - 1483-1553 - define him as a Renaissance figure, shaped by the emergence of humanist ideals (17). Fourteen eighty-three, however, recalls for me the birth of Martin Luther, reminding me that the movements known to us as "Renaissance" and "Reformation" coincided for Rabelais. This coincidence is not problematic for Lazard because she assumes that Rabelais's Christian humanism simply extends the ideals of the Renaissance to religion. Her Rabelais is thus a seamless figure - the humanist heralding a new age, in which reason will supplant dogma and superstition.

Jeanneret, however, offers us a different Rabelais, one entranced by the mystery of life, by the ineffability of meaning. This Rabelais is the counterpoise to Lazard's confident humanist. But what Jeanneret sees from a literary perspective as Rabelais's entrancement with a hermeneutical problem, I see from a historical perspective as his obsession with a cultural problem, characterized by the tension between "Renaissance" and "Reformation." Indeed, the hermeneutical problem is emblematic of this tension, whose roots lie gnarled at the heart of Western culture.

In his biography, Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University PreSs, 1988), William J. Bouwsma has admirably shown how this contemporary of Rabelais was torn between conflicting cultural forces. We can describe these forces in terms of "Renaissance" and "Reformation," here taken as ideal types for cultural traditions rooted in the civilization's Hellenic and Hebraic origins. These traditions were fundamentally incompatible, mixing only to separate again, like oil and water. We might describe the Hellenic tradition as secular, rational, and sensual, and the Hebraic one as religious, mystical, and ascetic. The incompatibility of these traditions was especially heightened during the sixteenth century, when the emphasis on the Greco-Roman side of the culture brought forth a Judeo-Christian resurgence. And the mid-sixteenth century was the time of greatest tension. (By the end of the century, spiritual concerns had begun to yield to secular realities, and herein lies Desrosiers-Bonin's error in using Charron's brand of fideism as the model for Rabelais's spirituality, a move that once again reduces "Reformation" to "spiritual Renaissance" by taking the mystery out of religion.) When viewed from the perspective of this tension, Rabelais is no more a "Renaissance" figure than Calvin is a "Reformation" one; rather, both are torn between conflicting cultural poles.

As a device for understanding the sixteenth century, the Hellenic/Hebraic duality is fundamentally different from Foucault's power/transgression one. The former is specific to Western culture whereas the latter is not. And, more importantly, the former is transformed in each incarnation whereas the latter is not. In other words, the tension between "Renaissance" and "Reformation" is not just a variant of the original Hellenic/Hebraic duality but a fundamental reconceptualization of it in the light of modern circumstances, which serve to define each cultural pole anew. Luther's ideal of the Apostolic Church, for example, has little in common with Christ's apostles, who themselves have rewritten the message of their Hebrew forefathers.

Bouwsma describes how Calvin was beset by anxiety born of conflicting impulses, in which the desire for order and control was accompanied by the feeling of constriction and suffocation (48). Let us resist the temptation to reify our ideal types, to attribute the desire for order to one cultural tradition and the fear of suffocation to the other. Bouwsma has brilliantly shown how these traditions, and their diverse elements, become all jumbled together, both in Calvin and in the sixteenth century. Suffice it to say that Calvin's desire for order and fear of suffocation were born of the very fact of cultural conflict. This situation engendered a sense of unease and anxiety. Whereas Calvin experienced this anxiety while seeking to reorder a traditional world that had become disordered, Rabelais experienced it in another way, as his attempt to break loose from tradition excited a countervailing desire for order.

At this point, the eternal graduate student in us awakens - skeptical of all generalizations - and confidently demands to be shown empirical proof of early modern "anxiety." Let us begin by positing that anxiety can manifest itself in obsessive-compulsive behavior, and that this kind of behavior is not unique to the modern era. Beneath its genial surface, Rabelais's humor provides a literary example of this behavior, as evidenced by the very meaning of the term, "Rabelaisian," which denotes not so much excessive coarseness as coarse excessiveness.

Jeanneret deals with this quality in his concluding essay, "Debordements Rabelaisiens," in which he analyzes the two halves of Rabelais's novel. The first two books - reflecting the humanist optimism of the first half of the French Renaissance - are characterized by a comic enthusiasm for knowledge that is encyclopedic but not excessive. The third and fourth books - reflecting the disillusionment of humanist hopes in the second half of the period - are characterized by a grotesque humor that transforms light-hearted encyclopedism into heavy-handed excess. Rabelais's goal, however, remains the same throughout, to free his readers from the shackles of tradition and open their minds to new possibilities - in harder times, he simply uses more drastic means. And Jeanneret finds these means most apparent in lists, like the grotesque ones describing Quaresmeprenant's internal and external anatomy.

I would submit, however, that Rabelais's list making - everywhere apparent throughout the entire novel - is indicative of a deep desire for order that characterizes both "halves" of the French Renaissance. From this perspective, the "humanist optimism" of the first two books is subtly undercut by a pervasive disquiet, by a compulsion for order manifesting itself in lists that aim at being not only encyclopedic but exhaustive. They are, as it were, too complete, as if the activity of list making has developed a momentum of its own, becoming an end in itself.

In his seminal essay, "Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel" (translated in The Dialogic Imagination [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981]), Mikhail Bakhtin has described how the activity of list making serves the requirements of order. Rabelais's frequent descriptions of eating and defecating take the form of narrative lists involving a host of unlikely objects. These lists serve to bring the things of the world into accord with the human body, which is Rabelais's touchstone in existence. The activity of list making thus reflects both the breakdown of traditional categories and, simultaneously, the creation of new ones. And its compulsive quality reflects the anxiety inherent in the crucial moment of cultural deformation and reformation.

One might attribute this compulsive quality either to the rhetorical practice of copia or, better still, to Rabelais's ridicule of the practice (see, for example, Jeanneret, 119). This rhetorical interpretation is correct, as far as it goes - but I think one can go farther. Rabelais's humor is rhetorically effective in the relatively short list of Gargantua's ass-wipes - but what about in the list of Gargantua's games (about 220 of them), or in the list of books at the Library of Saint Victor's (numbering about 150 volumes), or the 160 or so expressions for Friar John's testicles in Book Three (followed by an equal number describing Panurge's), or in the over 200 adjectives in Book Three describing Triboulet's so-called virtues? Yes, the fact that Rabelais lists a total of 320 expressions for the male genitalia is indeed funny, but only a scholar would bother to bring this fact to light by actually counting them. And wherein lies the humor in listing 220 games? Perhaps the key to the humor of these lists is the very fact that Rabelais even bothered to catalogue slang expressions and mundane pastimes. If so, he has moved beyond copia into classification.

That Rabelais's lists take on a momentum of their own, crushing the jokes under their own weight, is indicative of his compulsion for order, which is simply the flip-side of his desire for freedom. Marie Fontaine provides us with an example of the tension between these states when she describes the three lists detailing Quaresmeprenant's anatomy. These lists - totaling about 175 entries - parody contemporary anatomical theories and diagnostic practices. Indeed, the body is rendered into so many discrete parts that it is hardly recognizable as a whole.

But this mockery of medical learning is double-edged. Rabelais constructs these lists at variance with contemporary theories, according to his own logical ordering of entries, in which he attempts to be as exhaustive as possible. Quaresmeprenant's internal anatomy is presented in descending order, from brain to bladder; his external anatomy moves in ascending order from feet to head; and, the final list is organized according to his expectorations, expressions, and excretions. The exhaustive nature of these lists thus reflects not only comic purposes but also logical ones. Rabelais's humor here is necessarily double-edged, for the order he parodies is ultimately of his own creation. This is but a small example of his yearning for order, the very imposition of which belies the complexity he perceives.

Rabelais's omnipresent lists bear the mark of this ambivalence, which, I think, also lies at the heart of his excessiveness in general. His highly touted "freeing" of the human spirit thus comes at a price, paid on page after congested page of his novel, as Rabelais scrambles to order his new-found universe. Of course, the human body and its natural functions are the chief focus for this classificatory activity. But even though it has a focus, classification is still arbitrary, as evidenced by Rabelais's mockery of his own anatomical lists.

In the final analysis, Rabelais's is an uneasy humor, analogous to John Gardner's in Grendel, where the monster's growing obsession with revenge transforms his watch words, "Balance is everything," into, "Balance is anything." Rabelais's desire for order is characterized by the same glib quality. Jeanneret sees this quality as a hermeneutical strategy - and on one level it undoubtedly is - but Rabelais's ambivalence turns this strategy inward upon itself, making him the knowing butt of his own giddy laughter. How, I wonder, did he feel as he dabbed the tears from his eyes?

NORTHEASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY