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| Feeding Gargantua |
François Rabelais's
'novel'
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel narrates the adventures of the two giants who give the books their titles. The texture of the narrative is soaked in food and drink. The fabric of the fiction is defined by an exuberant linguistic excess and a copiousness of detailed physical decription. This has the effect of fattened out the corpulent text in all directions. Rabelais has created a feast for all the senses, and the experience of reading it can be compared to taking part in a joyous but rowdy banquet.
There's a fierce energy in the unstoppable desire to embrace life, and this theme and mood finds comic expression in the need to celebrate the open body of common humanity. This notion of the open body was most famously outlined and analysed in Mikhail Bakhtin's book
Rabelais and His World. While Rabelais's carnivalesque humour pokes fun at different versions of authority and respectability, Bakhtin's critical work, composed in the 1930s has similarly been read as a satire on the official version of life as experienced under the oppressive Russian Stalinism. Accordingly, the celebration of the open body can be read as a challenge to totalitarian ideology, and to the regulation of the human body; by continuing Rabelais's vision, Bakhtin offers a satire on discipline, regulation, dietary regimes, authoritarianism and state control.
In his work on Dostyevsky and the poetics of the novel Bakhtin had characterised the genre in terms of its dialogical nature; its preference for a multiplicity of styles and voices. Arguably, the conversational mode can also be linked, in the form of the feast or banquet, to the raucous celebration of the human voice, and perhaps, more grotesquely, to the open mouth: eating, devouring, talking, singing, shouting...
The encyclopaedic abundance of detail and the all-encompassing range of the text provides evidence for the influence of the classical genre of epic, and links it to the heroic quest and monster narratives that came to be called romance. But rather than presenting the world with from the position of heroic hierarchies, Rabelais world, and Bakhtin's enthusiastic celebration of it, so bottom up. It workd from low to high, with an emphasis on organic process, life forces, and common comic energies. While there are satirical elements, these are never bitter, negative, or destructive.
In a sense, the more modern dimension of Rabelais's writing is best explained by the welding of epic and romance range and iclusiveness with a resolutely contemporary grotesque popular realism that would eventually feature in the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth century
Food is deeply coded into the fiction from the outset. I want to argue also that what the writing presents is a philosophy of the belly, and a celebration of alimentary discourses and culinary critiques. Accordingly, from the start, the author blends high and low references (body and mind) by alluding to the traditional relations between conversation, conviviality, and critical thinking. "The Author's Prologue to the First Book." clearly repays study as the entrée to this great work. In order to support the task of attending to the culinary critique, all the references to gloriuos food have been highlighted.
The Author's Prologue to the First Book.
Most noble and illustrious
drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified
blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings),
Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato's, which is entitled
The Banquet,
whilst he was setting forth the praises of his schoolmaster Socrates
(without all question the prince of philosophers), amongst other
discourses to that purpose, said that he resembled the Silenes. Silenes
of old were little boxes, like those we now may see in the shops of
apothecaries, painted on the outside with wanton toyish figures, as
harpies, satyrs,
bridled geese,
horned hares,
saddled ducks, flying
goats, thiller harts, and other such-like counterfeited pictures at
discretion, to excite people unto laughter, as Silenus himself, who was
the foster-father of good
Bacchus, was wont to do; but within those
capricious caskets were carefully preserved and kept many rich jewels
and fine drugs, such as balm, ambergris, amomon, musk, civet, with
several kinds of precious stones, and other things of great price. Just
such another thing was Socrates. For to have eyed his outside, and
esteemed of him by his exterior appearance, you would not have given the
peel of an
onion for him, so deformed he was in body, and ridiculous in
his gesture. He had a sharp pointed nose, with the look of a
bull, and
countenance of a fool: he was in his carriage simple, boorish in his
apparel, in fortune poor, unhappy in his wives, unfit for all offices in
the commonwealth, always laughing,
tippling, and merrily
carousing to
everyone, with continual gibes and jeers, the better by those means to
conceal his divine knowledge. Now, opening this box you would have found
within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than human understanding,
an admirable virtue, matchless learning, invincible courage, unimitable
sobriety, certain contentment of mind, perfect assurance, and an
incredible misregard of all that for which men commonly do so much
watch, run, sail, fight, travel, toil and turmoil themselves.
Whereunto (in your opinion) doth this little flourish of a preamble
tend? For so much as you, my good disciples, and some other jolly fools
of ease and leisure, reading the pleasant titles of some books of our
invention, as Gargantua, Pantagruel, Whippot
,
the Dignity of Codpieces, of
Pease and Bacon with a Commentary,
&c., are too ready to judge, that there is nothing in them but jests,
mockeries, lascivious discourse, and recreative lies; because the
outside (which is the title) is usually, without any farther inquiry,
entertained with scoffing and derision. But truly it is very unbeseeming
to make so slight account of the works of men, seeing yourselves avouch
that it is not the habit makes the monk, many being monasterially
accoutred, who inwardly are nothing less than monachal, and that there
are of those that wear Spanish capes, who have but little of the valour
of Spaniards in them. Therefore is it, that you must open the book, and
seriously consider of the matter treated in it. Then shall you find that
it containeth things of far higher value than the box did promise; that
is to say, that the subject thereof is not so foolish as by the title
at the first sight it would appear to be.
And put the case, that in the literal sense you meet with purposes
merry and solacious enough, and consequently very correspondent to their
inscriptions, yet must not you stop there as at the melody of the
charming syrens, but endeavour to interpret that in a sublimer sense
which possibly you intended to have spoken in the jollity of your heart.
Did you ever pick the lock of a cupboard to steal
a bottle of wine out
of it? Tell me truly, and, if you did, call to mind the countenance
which then you had. Or, did you ever see a dog with
a marrowbone in his
mouth,—the beast of all other, says Plato, lib. 2, de Republica, the
most philosophical? If you have seen him, you might have remarked with what
devotion and circumspectness he wards and watcheth it: with what care
he keeps it: how fervently he holds it: how prudently he
gobbets it:
with what affection he breaks it: and with what diligence he
sucks it.
To what end all this? What moveth him to take all these pains? What are
the hopes of his labour? What doth he expect to
reap thereby? Nothing
but a little
marrow. True it is, that this little is more
savoury and
delicious than the great quantities of other sorts of
meat, because the
marrow (as Galen testifieth, 5. facult. nat. & 11. de usu partium)
is a
nourishment most perfectly elaboured by nature.
In imitation of this dog, it becomes you to be wise, to smell, feel
and have in estimation these fair goodly books,
stuffed with high
conceptions, which, though seemingly easy in the pursuit, are in the
cope and encounter somewhat difficult. And then, like him, you must, by a
sedulous lecture, and frequent meditation,
break the bone, and suck out
the marrow,—that is, my allegorical sense, or the things I to myself
propose to be signified by these Pythagorical symbols, with assured
hope, that in so doing you will at last attain to be both well-advised
and valiant by the reading of them: for in the perusal of this treatise
you shall find another kind of
taste, and a doctrine of a more profound
and abstruse consideration, which will disclose unto you the most
glorious
sacraments and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth
your religion, as matters of the public state, and life economical.
Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was
a-couching his Iliads and Odysses, had any thought upon those
allegories, which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, Cornutus
squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again from them? If you
trust it, with neither hand nor foot do you come near to my opinion,
which judgeth them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer, as the
Gospel
sacraments were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, though a certain
gulligut friar and true bacon-picker would have undertaken to prove it, if perhaps he had met with as very fools as himself, (and as the proverb says) a lid worthy of such a
kettle.
If you give no credit thereto, why do not you the same in these
jovial new chronicles of mine? Albeit when I did dictate them, I thought
upon no more than you, who possibly were
drinking the whilst as I was.
For in the composing of this lordly book, I never lost nor bestowed any
more, nor any other time than what was appointed to serve me
for taking
of my bodily refection, that is, whilst
I was eating and drinking. And
indeed that is the fittest and most proper hour wherein to write these
high matters and deep sciences: as Homer knew very well, the paragon of
all philologues, and Ennius, the father of the Latin poets, as Horace
calls him, although a certain sneaking jobernol alleged that his verses
smelled more of the wine than oil.
So saith a turlupin or a new start-up grub of my books, but a turd
for him. The
fragrant odour of the wine, O how much more
dainty,
pleasant, laughing,
celestial and delicious it is, than that smell of oil! And I will glory
as much when it is said of me, that I have
spent more on wine than oil,
as did Demosthenes, when it was told him, that his expense on oil was
greater than on
wine. I truly hold it for an honour and praise to be
called and reputed
a Frolic Gualter and a Robin Goodfellow; for under
this name am I welcome in all choice companies of Pantagruelists. It was
upbraided to Demosthenes by an envious surly knave, that his Orations
did
smell like the sarpler or wrapper of a foul and filthy oil-vessel.
For this cause interpret you all my deeds and sayings in the perfectest
sense; reverence
the cheese-like brain that feeds you with these fair
billevezees and trifling jollities, and do what lies in you to keep me
always merry. Be frolic now, my lads, cheer up your hearts, and joyfully
read the rest, with all the ease of your body and profit of your reins.
But hearken, joltheads, you viedazes, or dickens take ye,
remember to
drink a health to me for the like favour again, and I will pledge you
instantly,
Tout ares-metys.
Notes
French text first published 1532. English translations 1653 and 1693 by Thomas Urquhart
