The Design of Rabelais' Tiers Livre de Pantagruel & The Design of Rabelais' Quart Livre de Pantagruel.

Edwin Duval. The Design of Rabelais' Tiers Livre de Pantagruel.

(Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 316.) Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 1997. 247 pp. index, append. n.p. ISBN: 2-600-00228-6.

Edwin Duval. The Design of Rabelais' Quart Livre de Pantagruel.

(Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 324.) Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 1998. 150 pp. + index. n.p. ISBN: 2-600-00288-X.

Rabelais' later work, Le Tiers Livre des faicts et dicts heroiques du bon Pantagruel [Third Book] (1546) has often been read as a chatty book devoid of heroics whose series of consultations on the "marriage question" are randomly strung together; his Quart Livre des faicts et dicts heroiques du bon Pantagruel [Fourth Book] (1552), has been read topically, as a satirical assault on church, state, and the hypocrisy that defined France's ecclesiastical elites in the mid-sixteenth century. In the books under review, Edwin Duval places the issue of interpretation squarely at the crux of Rabelais' aeuvre, but not interpretation in thrall to the polysemy of words enamored of recent critics who approach the books as texts. Rather, Duval enjoins us to regard Rabelais' giant stories as works of literature bearing a structure, a design, and a meaning that is knowable, rather than indeterminate. For Duval, interpretation is double: it is both hermeneutic and moral, and it is the latter, moral judgment, that exemplifies the evangelical caritas that Rabelais seeks to instill by example in his readers (Design, TL, 187).

Since the publication of The Design of Rabelais' Pantagruel (Yale UP) in 1991, Duval has emphasized the unity of purpose that structures Rabelais' three-book adventures of Pantagruel. Fully elaborated in the Third and Fourth Books, this unity consists in the hero's attempt to create a Christian community through the exemplary practice of evangelical love, without which humans live in bitter sectarian (and territorial) conflict. Specifically, wars and feuds (including academic quarrels) demonstrate that humans cannot live together in mutual tolerance, and that the philautia of the books' comic fool, Panurge, breeds intolerance to the extent that innocent victims, such as a dying poet, find themselves branded as heretics. Far from the comic polyglot of Pantagruel, the older Panurge in the Third Book is a fanatic whose zeal condemns his enemies to the bonfires. Philautia is thus shown to be at the crux of Panurge's (and the age's) great dilemma, how to construct a new ethics of tolerance from the ruins of relig ious violence.

In The Design of Rabelais' Pantagruel, Duval argued that the giant narrative was an imitatio Christi and its hero a savior come to redeem man's sins against his brothers. This typological reading was the first iteration of the Christian philosophy of caritas that in the Fourth Book finds its classical roots in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in notion of the mean. Rabelais' hero exemplifies moderation based on "a conciliation of extremes that would allow for a peaceful, harmonious coexistence even of polar opposites" (Design, QL, 94-95), but this ideal is undermined continually by the book's monsters whose antagonisms will not be reconciled, even through fiction's utopian potential. In 1552, with Europe at war and her despots on the rampage, Duval maintains that "[Rabelais'] end is not apolis or an ideology better than all the rest. . . but rather peace and harmony with and among the increasingly dangerous utopias already present in the world.. ." (Design, QL, 107). Instead, we see Saran at work, particularly in the episode where the crew meets a monstrous whale, or Physetere, named by Panurge Leviathan and linked by that Old Testament reference to the Book of Job, as medieval commentators had also done, but christianized here by Pantagruel's harpoons bearing the sign of the Trinity on the beast. This chapter 6 of the Fourth Book study, "The Sign at the Center and the Quest Without End," is an astonishing instance of Duval's power of exegesis, wherein biblical intertexts reinforce the christological reading of the midpoint, while at the same time folding apparently trivial details into the book's argument. What may have been dismissed as local color on the high seas, that is, is revealed to be a sign of Rabelais' all-encompassing epic quest.

It follows, then, that the explication of individual chapters is largely futile except when such local insights can be related to the larger whole, or, in Duval's terms, telos. Otherwise, critical readings amount at best to partial knowledge that is, in the end, literally partial, because it is not conceived of as belonging to an "overarching design." Duval is particularly skeptical of critics who work in what may be loosely called "the modern," i.e., the inquiry that places texts (not books) within a post-Saussurian indeterminacy of language rooted in the ambiguity of signs. Michel Jeanneret's work stands as an example of this tendency, but historicist readings are limited in their usefulness when they take up single episodes without regard for their "place and function within a larger design or within a larger literary tradition" (Design, QL, 135, n. 16). Duval's stance demands implicitly that critics find a telos of their own, and thus the very notion of an "overarching design" stands for more than a meth od; it is a postulate of criticism to be defended against the claims of narrative to be non-closured, self-generating, even a product of chance. This is a severe test, the consequence of which is to split off Rabelais the poet from Rabelais the evangelical humanist whose taste for paradox, to be sure, enlivens the narrative but ultimately de-emphasizes the works' comic play. Duval's argument underscores his deeply held belief that the work of literature possesses unity, and, furthermore, that the critic's job is to elucidate the pattern that structures episodes into a unified whole. Yet lovers of the work's raucous farce will find that wordplay, gestures, and other nonverbal expressions are given little attention in these studies; likewise for Rabelais' phallic humor. Is the sexual innuendo of the woodcutter Couillatris' name not pertinent to Rabelais' design too?

The first of the two books reviewed here, The Design of Rabelais' Tiers Livre de Pantagruel, makes the important distinction between interpreting texts and interpreting people. In multiple episodes, Panurge, Pantagruel, and their followers listen to, then interpret, the advice of the pillars of society (theologian, doctor, philosopher, et al.), and, conversely, society's misfits (a hag, a mute, an astrologer, a fool, a dying poet, and other non-institutional voices) on Panurge's question: "Shall I marry?" "If so, will I be cuckolded"? Duval argues that it is not the content but the mode of interpretation of each speech that counts, with the result that the Third Book becomes a testing ground for humanism's hermeneutic debate over literal and figurative readings, dramatized by Panurge's self-interested interpretations that twist speakers' words to his own advantage. To this phi/autia Rabelais opposes Pantagruel's example of interpretative generosity ("interpreter toutes choses a bien"), a striking example of which occurs in the judge Bridoye episode, where Pantagruel elects to interpret "wrongly," rather than condemn a man whose good judgment has been tainted by old age.

Duval shows that moral judgment must prevail over more rigid hermeneutic correctness, and it is here, in the revision of hermeneutic theory, that Duval is at his most compelling. At the Third Book's mid-point, Duval argues that the design of the book is centripetal, so that the imbricated episodes are constructed around a "unique center" (Design, TL, 124) borrowed from a proverb in Erasmus' Adagia, "Congnois Toy," or the Socratic "Know thyself." Here Panurge condemns himself as a good hetmeneutist but a moral fool, just like the astrologer he condemns for his vanity but ironically resembles. As Duval notes, these words of wisdom appear at the very center of the speech, the episode, the quest, and the book: "The two words [Congnois Toy] are even printed in upper case letters, lest having come this far the reader mistake the precise point around which the entire book turns" (Design, TL, 126). Rather than look for the book's telos in its conclusion, Duval shows that good readers will find it in plain sight, at the center, where Rabelais positions the key to the lesson caritas that will dominate the Fourth Book as the ideal of the Christian community.

There is not space enough here to note the wealth of new research Duval presents in his study of the Fourth Book. As in the preceding volume, order is found in the book by identifying "an overarching symmetrical pattern of concentric frames" (Design, QL, 52). The book's apparently chaotic prologue is revealed to be structured around a midpoint, this time located in the bitter stalemate between the philosophers Ramus and Galland, a harbinger of the unresolved conflicts to come, notably, between Lent and Carnival. Rabelais inserted 10 new islands into his augmented 1552 version of the Fourth Book, including Medamorhi, Ennasin, Macraeon, Farouche, Ruach, and Gaster, and these additions are read by Duval as "false utopias" (Design, QL, 23) because they undermine the ideal of a Christian community based on caritas. The island of Ruach, where the locals live on wind, is complexly related to the island of Tohu Bohu, whereas in the Gaster episode, Duval demonstrates how the dreadful monster who is all stomach nevert heless firs within Panragruel's evangelical vision. No critic can work seriously on Rabelais without taking these exquisitely documented readings into account.

Duval's conclusion to the Fourth and final book rests on a paradox that mirrors the equipoise he sees in Rabelais' work throughout: "Rabelais has guaranteed the absolute closure of his epic while at the same time guaranteeing the absolute openendedness of the voyage it relates" (Design, QL, 142). Like the enigmas planted in the complete oeuvre, this conclusion reminds us that humanism's quest begins and ends in an ethics of community.