The Rabelaisian Mythologies.

Gauna begins with a discussion of the One and the Many as envisioned by Plato and as a valid means of categorizing human experience. He makes it clear that he, representing the tradition of historical scholarship and consonant with Socratic ideals, is a partisan of the One, "stability," whereas he believes that modern deconstructive critics follow the Sophists in espousing the Many, "genesis." Rabelais waivers between the two: after he seriously presents the Ideal, the carnivalesque swarm breaks through. Next, Gauna explains his title. For Plato, mythos is either good or bad depending on its use; he often uses it to bring forth an otherwise inaccessible truth. Rabelais calls his works "mythologies" because they convey such truth; they act also medically, mixing the right amount of the One into the Many. For Gauna, the focal point of this mixing is the world of demons as Plato understood them: entirely good intermediaries between the One (the ideal, divine world of stability) and our world of genesis. It is their influence that betters our lives, if we are sensible enough to follow it.

Gauna comments on each Rabelaisian book in turn, and his impetus often depends on polemics against previously published critical monographs. Thus, for Pantagruel, he reacts to Duval, Defaux, and Screech; for Gargantua, to Screech and Schwartz; for the Tiers Livre, the above plus Ceard and Baraz; for the Quart Livre, Marichal, Paul Smith, and Saulnier are added. Few other critics need apply, and periodical literature is all but ignored.

He characterizes Pantagruel as Rabelais's apprenticeship where he shows himself to be a Christian Stoic with an ever-deepening knowledge and appreciation of Plato and Plutarch. Rabelais daringly adopts such Platonic principles as, for instance, traducianism (the notion that the soul is transmitted with the semen, a heresy drawn from Diotima's account of the ascent of the soul in the Symposium), which Gauna sees in Gargantua's letter. The Thaumaste episode, Gauna avers, exemplifies Rabelais's semi-sympathetic struggle with the magus tradition he will later espouse. Gargantua receives summary treatment in thirty-two pages, since all of it, including Theleme, smacks of Christian Stoicism and evangelism, and less of things Platonic.

Given his central concern with demons, Gauna especially focuses on the Tiers Livre. The questions asked in the TL are: "How may we know ourselves?" and "How may we be happy?" (answer: "By knowing and desiring the Good"); "How do we know the Good?" ("By knowing ourselves"); "How to know ourselves?" ("By taking divine and human advice - if we have the humility to do so"). Gauna explains how each divination affords Panurge the opportunity to heed good demonic advice, and how mortals, too, offer theirs - all in vain, rejected by sophistical Panurge, soul-sick because blinded by excessive self-love.

In studying the Quart Livre, Gauna concentrates most fully on the Isle des Macraeons, the death of Pan, and on Pantagruel's demon who directs him not to land on Ganabin. Gauna's Rabelais is not an Erasmian evangelical or an orthodox Christian. His mythologies are radically unorthodox: Christ/Pan is the greatest demon, mediating between God and man. For Rabelais, serious belief in an animistic continuum, a great chain of being, was still possible. Our divided post-Cartesian world, however, can only look back with nostalgia.

For this reader, Gauna has abundantly achieved his stated purpose, opening new vistas, elucidating many obscure texts. At the same time, he is often too narrow, too exclusive - preparing for his critics and readers the procrustean bed he decries. On the whole, however, partisans of the One will find much to enjoy, and will greatly profit from this book.

FLORENCE M. WEINBERG Trinity University