Independent Scholar
Spring 2005 for a graduate literature course, “Renaissance to Romanticism”
Prompt: Research & Write as a Detective, letting reader observe that Process
To the Right Honourable
JACOBI FABRI STAPULENSIS
One of the Professors of Philosophy
at La Sorbonne
Good Uncle Jacques, notwithstanding your repeated refusal, I still wish from you the blessing of this work, for it is owing to your patrilineage that this essay is begun. Though many years have passed since you expressed the desire that such a student as I should continue your tradition, forgive me in reminding you that your time’s imagination is written in the book of nature by the finger of God himself, and is destined to be reborn time and again.
True, my rebirthing of it bears little value but to make my own students smile, although the two authors from whom I’ve taken it—zealots in their own doctorial fashion—heartily condone such folly. It was, after all, you who first recommended me to the earliest of those benefactors, caricatured as you are in
the Tiers Livre. I had only to invoke the name of his magnum opus and the form appeared, by virtue of the thoughtfulness of a compatriot professor of ours.
Pardon therefore, both of you, that I have implicated you without your consent in this essay on two of the bawdiest works in literary history; and allow me in this public manner to declare myself
Rabelais, Sterne and Literary Inheritance: An Introspective Preliminary Enquiry
Literary comparison between the works of François Rabelais in the 16th century and the works of Laurence Sterne in the 18th century opens questions of pertinence to the 21st century discipline of Literature. What these authors reveal in terms of human nature and humankind’s need to communicate its nature can be of use to the modern Academy in broadening the boundaries of what is considered academic discourse. In particular, these authors set an example of large-heartedness and open-mindedness in their creative writing that can be effectively adapted to literary criticism itself. Rather than remain an outside onlooker, archaic archeologist of dead artifacts, the literary critic of Rabelais and Sterne can adopt their largesse by including herself in the human comedy in order to retell their stories in her own authorial voice.
Agnes Cunningham, in St. Thérèse: The Mystic and the Renewal of the Christian Tradition, defines tradition as “a wellspring from which nourishment and refreshment come. [. . .] Indeed, out of this wellspring flows the paradox of continuity assured and enhanced by discontinuity” (92-93). This observation not only embodies the subversive purpose of satire, it empowers us to claim belonging to a chain of masters in a tradition by picking up the thread of their teaching and weaving our own garment out of it. I therefore accept the challenge to enliven tradition by including my family history during eras corresponding to the two works under comparison, in a retelling from my paternal grandmother’s genealogical study.[1] This exemplifies the right to literary inheritance, which Literature students in today’s Academy should be encouraged to claim. Through self-inclusion in the essay, I proclaim myself rightful heir to what Michael Seidel grandly titles, Satiric Inheritance, Rabelais to Sterne. The issue of narrative authority and legitimacy is an integral ingredient of satire, making it an honest point of departure for my preliminary introspective enquiry (61). In a way my essay functions like Gargantua and Pantagruel or The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in that it is a “revisionary narrative,” which absorbs the “precedent forms and reissue(s) them in ways that measure the larger inheritance of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance imagination” (60).
Concomitant with legitimating the truth of individual, local histories, literary professionals analyze works by specific authors within the context of an inclusive historical framework. Roy Porter, within the “Studies in European History” series, entitles the centerpiece chapter of The Enlightenment, “Who was the Enlightenment?” (38). His emphasis on “who” indeed, poses the question which he answers to the effect that human beings, alive in Europe during the Enlightenment years as interactive communicators, virtually all participated in defining the era:
Instead, recent social historians have invited us to regard the movement as a wider ferment inaugurated, sustained and spread by a vastly larger number of relatively obscure thinkers, writers, readers and contact loops. Nor could it ever have flourished without extensive support-networks of friends, sympathizers and fellow-travelers—comrades who gave refuge to exiles, or passed on letters and books to those living underground, in hiding. Sometimes the Enlightenment even drew upon the connivance and clandestine aid of those in authority, prepared to turn a blind eye to what were illegal publishing activities. [. . .] Above all, the Enlightenment would probably have fizzled out without the intrepid, and often highly risky, support of printers, publishers and book-distributors, who often had to organize the smuggling of illegal books across borders. (40-41)
This current Academic large-hearted and open-minded truth about the inclusiveness of human interaction I’ve termed, “Kaleidoscopic Communication” in a paper presented at the 2003 ACLA Conference, “Crossing Over” (Evans). The communicative proximity of globally divergent human cultures necessitates tolerance and inclusion of diverse authorial voices, within literary Academia in particular. The same global village, which pretends to homogenize cultures and purports to author formulaic solutions, demands audience for the villagers themselves, “local knowledge of activists, groupings, and crises” (40). And this is indeed what we see happening in our approach to literary theory: we enjoy looking at literature through the kaleidoscopic lenses of different disciplines’ theories.
Social historian Roy Porter re-tells (his)tories using the cutting-edge theory I term Kaleidoscopic Communication, which empowers literary scholars to apply what is perhaps our most cherished freedom—free speech—to our writings. Literary Academics engage in probably the most powerful of disciplines because of the freedoms Academia has of necessity embraced. We deal in humankind’s intimacies: from race, gender and sexuality, to disability, and even into the corral of our sacred cow, religion. Turn it upside down and backwards, from dogma to theology to metaphysics, and we are treading there. We can applaud the wisdom encoded within Pagan as well as Christian symbolism. The vistas of our Academic discourse extend from Greek comedies, wherein the actor’s wardrobe includes a yard-long erect penis, to Dante’s sublime refrain, “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle,” “It was from there that we emerged, to see—once more—the stars.” We can openly acknowledge the literary brilliance of a Renaissance polyglot priest as he ponders perhaps his own marriage through the looking-glass bottle of the male sex organs, and the audacity of an Enlightenment cleric who parodies his predecessor in the tradition of learned wit: both of whom risked the severest of censure in the cause of free speech.
Seidel defines inheritance as, “[a] metaphor for the preservation of form,” and the narrative encoding inheritance “a metaphoric ‘carrying across’ from one time to another” (Preface xi). This crossing of space-time thresholds through narrative seems to me equivalent to crossing communicative thresholds within the present time. In the ACLA paper by this title, I’ve called the recognition of narrative’s four-dimensional fluidity, Threshold to Mindfulness of Reciprocity (Evans). This paradox of transcending boundaries is embraced by satire through ironies that disrobe humankind, revealing its essential nature as satyr: “half-god, half-beast” (Seidel 5). Satire portrays a holistic vision of life: as both nature and nature subverted, the natural coincidence of opposites. “Physis/Nature” is, according to Panurge, “‘most fertile and prolific in herself,’” recounting how “Nature’s” children of imaculate conception and birth—“Beauty and Harmony”—are contradicted by “Antiphysis’s” children of copulation—“Misharmony and Discord” (77).
For a healthy human life within nature, Panurge recommends we seize life where we have been bereft of life (Seidel 74). From that passionate embrace, it naturally follows that the debt of marriage is a blessing that facilitates legitimate self-propagation through our children and future descendents, “‘in succession till the hour of the Last Judgment,’” when peace is perfectly complete (76). Following from Panurge’s sublime vision of the marriage sacrament, all debts are paid the lender by Jesus Christ on our behalf at the end of time. Gargantua thus propagates a complete cycle of genesis and dissolution, “the full narrative cycle of creation” (76). Gargantua as son is essentially performing the function of a Christ figure: falling into elemental nature—the savage saint—in order to resurrect himself and all humankind through the “history” that is his life; and on through endless cycles of creation and dissolution via his gigantic progeny, the genealogical literary legacy that is my own satiric inheritance as much as it is all of humankind’s.
In order to situate the two literary works under comparison in their respective historical eras, I’ll begin chronologically contextualizing them. Our French family ancestor, Mengen Lefèvre, was born a Catholic in 1510 in the Northeastern
Lefèvre d’Étaples attended the
The relevance of the Decameron’s stories of human foibles to readers from Bocaccio’s time in the mid-14th century, to Rabelais’ time in the early 16th century, and to readers in our time, bears witness to the fact that some things never change. The human comedy, which we each through our individual folly play out every day, proves often to have underlying mythic patterns that we can trace historically in terms of a particular literary tradition. This brings us back to the question, why are we interested in Literature as an academic discipline, and where does it coincide with our personal roots? The short answer is that Literature is valuable currency, a medium of exchange for humankind’s storytelling of who we are and where we come from.
There is a gap in information as to Lefèvre d’Étaples’ whereabouts during the 1480’s, but I assume he had returned home to his family’s land in Étaples. Returning to
[. . .] for the idea of two is as distinct from that of one as blueness from heat, or either of them from any number; and yet it is made up only of that simple idea of an unit repeated; and repetitions of this kind joined together make those distinct simple modes of a dozen, a gross, a million. (110-11)
Understanding of the multiplicity inherent in our world of forms is based on the idea of two, duality. Satire embraces that paradox, embodies that enigma, so is therefore an elevated literary form capable of negotiating the thresholds of interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism. It is appropriate that such an ameliorating power bears political censure throughout its historical course, yet finds sanctuary in the very courts it ridicules. Rabelais sought the protection of King Francis I, probable model for the infamous character Pantagruel. Sterne claimed the patronage of the celebrated William Pitt. The dedication to this essay mocks those of our two masters of satire and that of a third, Henry Fielding, with the intent of conjuring their presence. Collapsing time and duality into a momentary and delightful presence is the art of satire; in learned wit, the return of civilized man into savage primal matter.
During the European Renaissance, works both politically acceptable and those not acceptable to the political, Church and scholastic powers were available to scholars through their network of like-minded thinkers. Lefèvre read the works of the Medieval Spanish mystic Ramón Lull, and in 1491 copied a manuscript of Lull’s Book of the Lover and the Beloved (Hughes 12). As a Catholic, Lull was an author acceptable to European politicians, meaning leaders of state and religious leaders as well, for there was no separation of Church and state during that era. It is at this juncture between politicized religion and interior religion—the universal religion of love—that the necessarily interdisciplinary tapestry of European study becomes most interesting.
In 1494 Lefèvre published commentaries on Marsilio Ficino’s Pimander, the Hermetic account of Creation, a work attributed to the ancient Egyptian Thoth who was called by the Greeks “Hermes Trismegistus” (Thrice great). In 1495 Lefèvre published a commentary on the Sphaera of Joannis de Sacrobosco, a planetary map with Earth at its center. Johannes Reuchlin published De Rudementis Hebraicis in 1506. In 1509 Lefèvre, along the lines of other Christian Kabbalists, incorporated teachings similar to those from his De Magia naturali into Quincuplex Psalterium, (Five-fold Psalter). Even though he confined this later publication to Christian scriptures, the Church Fathers and Christian mystics, it was questioned as heretical regardless. By 1521 he was forced to flee
Rabelais’ character Pantagruel is a composite of diverse philosophies, symbolizing the syncretism between the older philosophy and Christian moral lessons, as embodied in The Third Book: “Reste néanmoins que le personnage de Pantagruel est composite plus qu’il n’y paraît, empruntant ses traits à diverses philosophies, symbolisant d’ailleurs ce syncrétism entre philosophie antique et leçons morales du christianisme dont le Tiers livre se fait l’echo” (Œuvres Complètes 1354 Notice). The editor’s notice supports my observation that Gargantua et Pantagruel, Tiers Livre in particular, is saturated with Platonic and neo-platonic theories such as Idea, ecstatic ravishment of the spirit, poetic inspiration, passion and enthusiasm. Also that neo-pythagoreanism is manifest throughout in such teachings as the significance of numbers. Lastly, that the first three books are written along the lines of Christian Kabbalah (Œuvres Complètes 1354 Notice). Jacques Lefèvres d’Étaples’ Book II of De Magia naturali expounds the number mysticism of “Pythagorean Philosophy” and Christian Kabbalah, “and of how the human mind, using arithmetical or geometrical symbolism, can ascend golden chains from the alterity and diversity of the world to a vision of the Ideas, of the One, and ultimately of the Trinity” (Rice 26-27).
In terms of the literary disciplines, I find it impossible to study European Literature without knowing a little about ancient history, religion and myth. In other words, our Literary legacy is indebted to numerous traditions. Num omnia possumus omnes (we can’t all do everything), so I’ve chosen to follow the mythic/mystical thread—the traditions of interior religion—currently from a French Renaissance humanist perspective. In following the historical development of ideas or of a literary tradition: nihil novi sub sole (nothing is new under the sun), a key lesson from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, from the Bible, and from
A main satirical motif that accompanies nihil novi sub sole is that the search for truth is endless:
Towards the beginning of the third year, which was in August, ninety-nine, my uncle Toby found it necessary to understand projectiles:—and having judged it best to draw his knowledge from the fountain-head, he began with N. Tartaglia, who it seems was the first man who detected the imposition of a canon-ball’s doing all that mischief under the notion of a right line.—This N. Tartaglia proved to my uncle Toby to be an impossible thing.
————— Endless is the Search of Truth! (
Military imagery is a natural allegorical choice for Sterne, since his “family lived in and around military camps in the
The survival of this type of learned wit in the eighteenth century may be attributed partly to an isolated event in literary history: the publication of the English Rabelais. The first two books of Urquhart’s translation appeared in 1653; but the wonderful third book, which we shall find most significant in relation to Sterne, was not published until 1693. [. . .] Rabelais was the greatest of all masters of the comic use of scholastic wit. (
Metaphysics, mysticism, myth and religion are intimately intertwined, so it follows that the literary study of learned wit, which traffics in metaphysical imagery, also treads on the other three categories. Mysticism concerns personal experience of divine union with God, for Christians through the intermediary of Jesus Christ, making the basic building block of mystical perception a love triangle: what metaphysical image better suited to satire? Mythological archetypes are universally recognizable translations of the particular. Learned wit is thus serendipitously peopled with theologians of mythic proportions, archetypical parodies of such learned men as Philip Melanchthon or Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (Œuvres Complètes 1355 Notice).
Carl Jung defines myth as, the “collective unconscious” which is being expressed through archetypes: “The source of myth is a universal, primordial psychic reservoir of images and symbols.” Regarding metaphysical image, Plato perceives name and form as unified, expressing them as Forms or Ideas, the pure objects of mathematical and dialectical knowledge. Truths are taken to involve knowledge of eternal unchanging Forms or Ideas. Material objects participate in the universal forms of Beauty, Equality, or the good (“Forms, Plato”). The Medieval habit of imagination was to harmonize idea and form, abstract and concrete.
The tradition of learned wit balances the comic and the sublime, “allowing a writer to reveal the play of opposites in his own character”(
There is another sort of distance or length, the idea whereof we get not from the permanent parts of space, but from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession: this we call “duration,” [. . .] time, and eternity. (122)
Locke discerns that we have “a threefold knowledge of existence” and, although words are imperfect, the names of figure and number are “least liable to doubt and uncertainty. [. . .] Whoever, that had a mind to understand them, mistook the ordinary meaning of ‘seven,’ or a ‘triangle?’” (527, 395). This equality, this balance of idea and form—in Mathematic’s geometry, in Literature’s word imagery—has its basis in the coincidence of opposites. That’s why the comic sublime has the power to equalize the tension of its own opposition. Through laughter, satire is healthy for humankind: Literature is again demonstrated as the currency of exchange in human relationships. Through storytelling of my own concrete life in a literary essay on fictitious lives, a deeper level of truth and meaning will come to light than if I had remained an outside “scientific” observer.
I allow myself a very human sense of humor in laughing with Rabelais as he archetypically satirizes such as my alleged ancestor, Lefèvre d’Étaples, in the character of Hippothadee the Theologue. In the Tiers Livre, Pantagruel invites a theologian, a physician and a lawyer for Sunday dinner, to discuss the matter of Panurge’s questionable marriage. Panurge swears by St. Picot (mocking Pico della Mirandola) about the worldly ineffectiveness of this triad. So to invoke the complete 4-fold manifest world in wise counsel, Pantagruel then adds:
Nor will it be (to my thinking) amiss, that we enter into the Pythagorick Field, and chuse for an Assistant to the Three aforenamed Doctors, our ancient faithful Acquaintance, the Philosopher Trouillogan; especially seeing a perfect Philosopher, such as is Trouillogan, is able positively to resolve all whatsoever Doubts you can propose. (Urquhart 3: 413-14)
In 1523, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, vicar-general of Meaux, began publishing Catholic scriptures in the French language. When his protector King Francis I was captured in 1525, these vernacular scriptures were forbidden by the Parliament of Paris. Thus, in 1525 Lefèvre fled to
Symbolic representations in Reformation art imagery, such as Lely’s Charles I with James Duke of York, revealed “a new Trinity in this fusion of the artist’s ‘spirit’ with the mutual understanding between Father and Son.” Their bodies and background form a triangle, with spirit portrayed as a spurt of breath from Father to Son, symbolic of the breath, or will of God (Potter 66-67). In Jacob Boehme’s Aurore, “the imagery of illumination and emanation” is depicted in the woodcut showing “the Trinity as a triangle seated on a throne, while the prophetic aspect is emphasized in the presence of the seven vials [. . .]” (Smith 202-3). This triangular representation of the Trinity is the basic building block of the Hexagram (image of the
[. . .] this peculiar Character which is not contrived by human Speculation, but is written in the Book of Nature by the Finger of God; for it points directly, not only at the Creation of this third Principle in six Days; but also at fallen and divorced Adam’s Reunion with the Divine Virgin SOPHIA. (80)
To reach this sublime idea in form, Boehme begins with its primary matter, its building block the triangle containing the mystical name of God YHVH—the Tetragrammaton—“The Unformed Word in Trinity” (56-57). The image of man’s perfection as a consummation in Divine Marriage portrays human existence as essentially sensual, perceptual, relative, revealing human subjectivity as the truth behind scientific observation. The Age of Reason has reason to doubt. Conversely to objectivity, the Renaissance master synthetes conceived the universe syncretistically, subjectively: a reflection of their faith.
In the treatise De Magia naturali, Lefèvre d’Étaples’ system of correspondences linked numbers, planets, and the hierarchy of angels. This harmony of natural magic he cherished as a prisca theologia (ancient theology/primordial theology) (Rice 27-28). He, and other Christian Kabbalists such as Pico della Mirandola, envisioned our world as coupled in love with the heavenly, the physical nexus of this relationship being Jesus Christ, Love personified. Christianity’s heaven or paradise, revered as the “
This tradition of devotion to Christ readily crossed the threshold into vividly sensual descriptions of Divine Union by such devotees as St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Benet of Canfield, Hildegard von Bingen,
Like every tradition, the Christian love triangle had its historical predecessors—nihil novi sub sole. Crossing the threshold of time, Song of Solomon in The Old Testament models the Pagan epithalamium: “A nuptial song or poem in praise of the bride and bridegroom, and praying for their prosperity” (OED). The Pagan Palace of Venus was to become the
“The Roman folk marriage songs were crude fescennine verses,” though linked through the tradition of masters to 12th century Christian poets of epithalamia such as Alan of Lille and John of Garland, by virtue of this marriage debt (
This underscores the universality of Rabelais’ Tiers Livre, where Panurge abstractly ponders his own personified nuptial coupling and the dualistic debt of marriage in perversely satirical fashion: debt is the essential Divine relationship rather than love. With incredible subtlety in chapters II-IV, Rabelais allegorizes negative theology. The Trinitarian act of Eucharist—the All of God flowing into the nothing of man through Christ’s love because of man’s lack or debt to marry Jesus—becomes the secular Trinitarian relationship of lender and borrower, who sustain creation by virtue of the debt between them:
[. . .] may Sanct Bablin, the good Sanct, snatch me, if I have not all my Lifetime held Debt to be as an Union or Conjunction of the Heavens with the Earth, and the whole Cement whereby the Race of Mankind is kept together; yea, of such Vertue and Efficacy, that, I say, the whole Progeny of Adam would very suddenly perish without it. Therefore, perhaps, I do not think amiss, when I repute it to be the great Soul of the Universe, which (according to the Opinion of the Academicks) vivifyeth all manner of things. In Confirmation whereof, that you may the better believe it to be so, represent unto your self, without any prejudicacy of Spirit, in a clear and serene Fancy, the Idea and Form of some other World than this; [. . .] a World without Debts. (Urquhart 3: 311)
In a layered allegory typical of satire, Rabelais transforms the idea of debt into the form of human blood, with our body parts in debt to each other and exchanging blood as the Eucharistic sacrament of self-propagating nourishment:
Methinks I hear it every whit as well as ever Plato did. [. . .] The Intention of the Founder of this Microcosm is, to have a Soul therein to be entertained, which is lodged there, as a Guest with its Host, it may live there for a while. Life consisteth in Blood, Blood is the Seat of the Soul; therefore the chieftest Work of the Microcosm is, to be making Blood continually. [. . .] The stuff and matter convenient which Nature giveth to be turned into Blood is Bread and Wine. [. . .] and through the veins is sent to all the Members; each parcel of the Body draws it then unto its self, and after its own fashion is cherished and alimented by it: Feet, Hands, Thighs, Arms, Eyes, Ears, Back, Breast, yea, all; and then it is, that who before were Lenders, now become Debtors. (Urquhart 3: 314-16)
In finale, Rabelais conjures the genesis of flesh through yet another transmutation, concluding with a final understated crescendo:
Believe me, it is a Divine thing to lend, to owe an Heroick Vertue. Yet is not this all; this little world thus lending, owing and borrowing, is so good and charitable, that no sooner is the above-specified Alimentation finished, but that it forthwith projecteth, and hath already forecast, how it shall lend to those who are not as yet born, and by that Loan endeavour, what it may, to eternize itself, and multiply in Images like the Pattern, that is, Children. To this end every Member doth of the choicest and most precious of its Nourishment, pare and cut off a Portion, then instantly dispatcheth it downwards to that place, where Nature hath prepared for it very fit Vessels and Receptacles, through which descending to the Genitories by long Ambages, Circuits and Flexuosities, it receiveth a Competent Form, and Rooms apt enough both in the Man and Woman for the future Conservation and perpetuating of Humane Kind. All this is done by Loans and Debts of the one unto the other; and hence have we this word, the Debt of Marriage. (Urquhart 3: 316-17)
Concurrently to the pious poets of epithalamium fame, the opposite tone in Roman folk marriage songs was also gaily taken up by the crude 12th and 13th century Goliards, “a name applied to those wandering students (vagantes) and clerks in England, France and Germany [. . .] who were better known for their rioting, gambling and intemperance than for their scholarship.” Their chants satirized the Church, their song-poems praised wine and riotous living, prelude to the Renaissance (“Goliard”). And prelude as well to the milieu Sterne in his time chose to saturate himself in: “While gathering of wits is certainly one of Rabelais’ favorite devices, the group may also call to mind Sterne’s participation in the Demoniacs—a Shandean gathering of Yorkshire men who seemed to share a common delight in wine, in bawdy, and in Rabelais” (New, Fragment 1083). Sterne also had plenty of contact with theological imagery to fuel his mockery of systematic perfectionism. His choice of the Hexagram image, craftily skewed and warped, to depict Uncle Toby’s perfect fortification, perhaps best reveals the universality of the Hexagram as a symbol of perfection (New, Penguin ed. Appendix 590). The irony comes full circle, since triangles are building blocks I used to construct Kaleidoscopic Communication, a Hexagram in 4 dimensions, as well. Nihil novi sub sole.
Endless are the allegorical clues linking Shandean time with Pantagrueline time. Uncle Toby’s fortifications are physical signs—images misshapen to effect our breaking into their original mould—that point to humankind’s common inheritance of using tools to manifest the form of an idea. In our generation, as in that of François Rabelais, the popular mind is more attuned to image as sign-tool than to word as sign-tool: they because it was a time of illiteracy; we because of time sped-up by media mass marketing. Being by default of popular mind, we’ll look at Sterne’s image before listening to his word. The enigmatic image of Uncle Toby’s skewed Hexagonal fortification, crowned with its “citadel” un-righted, its multifarious members demarcated with letters, blatantly invites reader to join author in self-parody (New, Penguin ed. Appendix 590). There is probably not one among Sterne’s readers who can claim they never played “fort” as a child. With this metaphorical imagery, our defenses are thus broken down by a memory vivid and charming to our imagination, opening the drawbridge of our heart to laughter. In textual critical analysis, writers need to employ the tools I’ve just demonstrated—of generalization and of judgment—in order to form a meaningful essay from an idea that merits instruction. And although Rabelais mocks that metaphor is never allowed the historian, literary artists must through poetic license employ its magic if we want our form to engender delight.
There is something intrinsically funny about Uncle Toby’s Hobby-Horse fort: because we see our own folly captured in Sterne’s depiction of it. The King’s “citadel” crown, i.e., the highest heaven, tipped askance as if falling partway off His head, reminds us perhaps of our own furtive embattlement within the heights of our profession’s signifiers—Word. Even to our woefully secular culture of reader-writers: a Hexagon used as a sign in the context of defeating Turks and other infidels or Pagans can only signify Judaism’s Star of David. We are hopefully spontaneously laughing at our own prejudices and irreverent crusades as we notice Sterne’s not-so-subtle metaphors, rather than continuing to guard the fort, to covet for an elite few Academia’s throne of literary inheritance. Perhaps this introspective laughing at ourselves fulfills Rabelais’ purpose in Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is Sterne’s model to delight as well as to instruct; in Rabelais’own words, his dedication “AUX LECTEURS”:
Amis lecteurs, qui ce livre lisez,
Despouillez-vous de toute affection,
Et, le lisant, ne vous scandalisez :
Il ne contient mal ne infection.
Vray est qu’icy peu de perfection
Vous apprendrez, sinon en cas de rire;
Aultre argument ne peut mon cueur élire,
Voyant le dueil qui vous mine et consomme.
Mieux est de ris que de larmes escripre,
Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme. (l’Intégral ed.1: 37)
This edition of Rabelais’ Œuvres Complètes has the added feature of a modern French translation alongside the original Middle French:
Amis lecteurs qui lisez ce livre,
Dépouillez-vous de toute passion
Et ne soyez pas scandalisés en le lisant.
Il ne contient ni mal ni corruption;
Il est vrai que vous n’y trouverez guère de perfection
Sauf en matière de rire;
Mon cœur ne peut choisir d’autre sujet
A la vue du chagrin qui vous mine et vous consume.
Il vaut mieux traiter du rire que des larmes,
Parce que le rire est le propre de l’homme. (l’Intégral ed. 1: 37)
Urquhart, in his English translation, alternatively positions the dedication after the prologue, titling it “RABELAIS TO THE READER”:
Good friends, my Readers, who peruse this Book,
Be not offended, whil’st on it you look:
Denude your selves of all deprav’d affection,
For it containes no badnesse, nor infection:
‘Tis true that it brings forth to you no birth
Of any value, but in point of mirth;
Thinking therefore how sorrow might your minde
Consume, I could no apter subject finde;
One inch of joy surmounts of grief a span;
Because to laugh, is proper to the man. (1: 23)
Raffel’s translation conveys equally well the same humility and goodwill towards humankind, placing the dedication again precedent to the prologue; “To My Readers”:
Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there’s nothing here that’s outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad—or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you’ll find is laughter;
That’s all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I’d rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.
BE HAPPY! (1: 3)
Rabelais’ dedication to his readers at the time of The First Book’s publication, 1534 or 1535, reflects the urgent need for solace at a time when François I “enjoins the Parlement to proceed against the ‘accursed heretic Lutheran sect,’” succeeded by the ‘Affaire des placards,’ and “repression and flight of evangelicals.” In these two years, 23 were burnt for heresy, followed by the execution of Sir Thomas More. Terror, tragedy and grief spanned the era.
About mid-16th century, French Protestants were nicknamed “Huguenots” (German for “Brothers in Arms”). Thirty years of Religious Wars occurred from 1562-1598. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre happened on August 24, 1572, when Catholics killed 20 thousand Huguenots in
Returning to the initial image under consideration from Tristram Shandy, the Hexagram: knowing that even from the vantage point of our fast-paced culture, though seemingly uninformed of religious matters, there is room in the space of a moment to recognize spiritual significance in a geometric form, we then might wonder what vantage points in the time of Sterne and of Rabelais may have revealed. Part of what makes their literary work funny now is that the reader knows going into it, or shortly after getting into the reading of it, that any efforts at thorough knowledge of their metaphorical meanings and innuendos will be futile. Literature as it’s practiced in modern Academia seemingly has no claim to this throne of sign-wisdom in comparison to men of letters, and even the common man, in Rabelais’ time. Our experience of humor from these masterpieces is in part achieved by this crack in our own veneer of control, that falling away of power and acceptance of defeat in ignorance. This feeling of literally being off-balance is what happens in response to the apparently ridiculous rendition of a fortress that is Uncle Toby’s. And readers who enjoy that kind of amusement stay onboard for more of the ride. We are careful in handling this catawampus contraption (lest some of the jollity un-vent through the portal of egress—more later) to notice that Uncle Toby’s choice of fortification design as depicted in the Hexagon follows the presumably Protestant architects’ specifications, which mirror but are more shored-up and convoluted than those from the land of Pagan (New, Penguin ed. Appendix 590).
As a learned clergyman in the modern-day Reformation, Sterne would have been familiar with the practice in Rabelais’ time of gematria—the ascription of the power of manifestation by Jewish mystics to numbers and letters—and therefore his deployment of letters as signifiers of the power behind the form of Uncle Toby’s fortification was meticulously intentional. Readers of Sterne’s day may or may not have caught the allusion, but within a well-crafted work of art there will always be layers of meaning more or less accessible to the eye: the degree of understanding augments, but is not essential to, delight.
Unfortunately for the depth of our delight, we haven’t spent 20 years researching the meaning behind Rabelais’ magnum opus, Gargantua and Pantagruel, as Claude Gaignebet has, but through his exhaustive treatise we can learn a little about what Sterne did or didn’t “get” in reading Rabelais. Again out of deference to the self-evident nature of images, I can make a further assumption about the efficacy of symbolism in Medieval/Renaissance times by observing the illustrations Gaignebet provides in Tome II. What strikes me about the various depictions on the whole is that the culture of Rabelais’ time was steeped in religious rituals, each of which was played out in a specific season and at a specific time according to the celestial calendar, according to sacred time. Through ritual, Kronos instructs as the form of time, delights as the name of time, with such continuous regularity before Sterne’s time that we might want to ponder what cultural richness was left to decay by secularization.
Rather than clinging solely to the myth of scientific objectivity, we can breathe life back into our faith in a deeper range of human experience. It is because human existence is essentially sensual, perceptual—relative—that our explanations of reality can be viewed holistically as a universal continuum of translation, a subjective, human translation. Pico’s tenet of universal accord can be said to be the foundation of interdisciplinary study. Humankind’s universe is perceived as a unified chain of relationships, a Kaleidoscopic Communication or translation, from one quantified whole to the next. Word, idea (Christ in Christian terminology), acts as a universal medium of exchange through its human form as Literature. The Medieval and Renaissance pre-scientific human-centered universe afforded mankind’s imagination the right to engage the universe, the right of self-inclusion this essay supports:
There was an all-embracing scheme of facts and meanings in which any particular matter for inquiry could always be placed. It was possible to pass from the particular event to the general cosmic pattern and vice versa with an easy, assured sweep of the mind as modern man can never enjoy. This opened up huge possibilities for comic genius. Thus with a single stroke of facile logic, Panurge invokes the entire cosmic order in support of borrowing and lending. (
Since literature is intended to instruct and delight, it is appropriate that this is a delightful thought to the metaphysically-inclined, and one which entertained my mind before I read it put so succinctly by D.W. Jefferson. Nihil novi sub sole. Through his inheritance of the tradition of learned wit in Tristram Shandy, Sterne draws on the historically, metaphysically, mythic-rich “Pantagruelizing” of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. These texts offer endless tantalizing ticklers, fathomless riches, for the encyclopedic reader who might otherwise tire of the confines of Literature as a discipline. We love literature because it embraces the coincidence of opposites, the full range of human understanding, from the sublime to the comic. It is this juxtaposition of the high with the low that makes satire funny. I knew an old Russian woman, child of Landed Gentry who fled to
The literary professional’s habit of silent introspection before self-propagation through narrative can be cultivated in patient research wanderings through used bookstores and online used and rare book dealers, as supplementary to active critical engagement in class. In that way the essayist can both compress time, by slowing down the fast pace of our modern life, and expand time by embedding her subject throughout the span of a larger historical context: much like a bellows (associated with Saint Blaise—more later) alternatively pressed together and pulled apart to create the breath of inspiration that fans illumination, and the exhalation of its opposite, satire. An observation readily brought to light thumbing through an old atlas was that the histories of
O Lord God now! how the Villain hath besmoaked me with Vexation and Anger, with Charms and Witchcraft, and with a terrible Coyl and Stir of Infernal Tartarian Devils! [. . .] He hath not learnt the first precept of Philosophy, which is, Know thy self [. . .]. (Urquhart 3: 395, 398)
Sterne embraced this humility by acknowledging the irony of his own limited feelings, “keeping the comic and the serious worlds of feeling on the right terms with each other [. . .] allowing a writer to reveal the play of opposites in his own character” (Jefferson 167). Rabelais embodied coincidence of opposites among the Renaissance learned. The opposite that accompanies Renaissance philosophical high seriousness is satire on the same topics. What makes Gargantua and Pantagruel so funny is the juxtaposition, the coincidence, of opposites, the relationship between the high and the low: Rabelais satirizes, in the lowest possible ways, kings, queens, and intellectual leaders of the day, as well as historical icons and ideas. Even so, high lessons are to be learned through his humorous means. His profane yet deep stories can be taken with the light heart the author seems to have intended. Rabelais teaches well through base humor because his intention was to instruct and delight. The reason for Rabelais’ outpouring of learned wit in Gargantua and Pantagruel seems to be a compassionate and effulgent creative drive, which he likens to Diogenes need to “roul his Jolly Tub;” to “tumble it, hurry it, joult it, justle it, overthrow it, evert it, invert it, subvert it, overturn it, beat it, thwack it, bump it, batter it, knock it, thrust it,” in order to not seem like the only subject in the “Republick” not busily fighting the war (Urquhart 3: 293-94). And the thrusts and parries of military imagery afford the double-entendre of sexual innuendo.
Rabelais likens the reader’s ferreting out the book’s allegories to the dog who is diligently and affectionately eating the marrow out of a bone:
In imitation of this Dog it becomes you to be wise, to smell, feele and have in estimation these faire goodly books, stuffed with high conceptions, which though seemingly easie 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 [. . .]. (Urquhart 1: 20)
Sterne as well takes up the tool of allegorical imagery in its most physical sense:
(Trim) stood before them with his body swayed, and bent forwards just so far, as to make an angle of 85 degrees and a half upon the plain of the horizon;——which sound orators, to whom I address this, know very well, to be the true persuasive angle of incidence;–in any other angle you may talk and preach;–’tis certain,–and it is done every day;–but with what effect,–I leave the world to judge!
The necessity of this precise angle of 85 degrees and a half to a mathematical exactness,—does it not shew us, by the way,—how the arts and sciences mutually befriend each other? (
Sterne, through physical descriptions that invoke an image—in this case Corporal Trim’s posture as a geometrical calculation with a meaning—like Rabelais’ “Pythagorical Symbols,” intend an allegorical veil, with Sterne’s book also as an encyclopedic metaphor of the arts and sciences. Regarding physical symbolism associated with the Corporal, I feel compelled to record in writing my interpretation of his infamous “flourish,” confident that it is a design universally recognized as a human pubic hair: “A thousand of my father’s most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy” (New, Penguin ed. 9: 549-50).
In spite of, or perhaps because of, Literature’s embrace of such irreverent subject material, Comparative Religions can be approached through literary study of myth and sacred texts. This again supports Literature’s value as a universal medium of exchange, or translation, between disciplines and between cultures. The Italian Renaissance propagated teachings on Comparative Religions: in the winter of 1491-2, Lefèvre d’Étaples traveled to
An encapsulated example of literary inheritance from Rabelais to Sterne is found in the 1759 A Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais, Sterne’s “first attempt at what ultimately became Tristram Shandy.” Melvyn New, in his Introduction to Sterne’s Rabelaisian Fragment, explains that Sterne openly linked himself to the same literary tradition as Rabelais: he “invokes the name of Rabelais several times in the work itself and in writing about Tristram to correspondents;” his self-caricature Yorick “carries a volume of Gargantua and Pantagruel in his ‘right-hand coat pocket,’” and in a reply to a critic distances himself from Swift while aligning himself with Rabelais. New holds that Sterne, like Rabelais, has the capacity to see himself as the point of ridicule, using as an example Yorick’s self-denigration in lamenting that he will surely be hanged over his sermon for he had in truth stolen it (Fragment 1083-85).
Panurge first enters Rabelais’ text rather flamboyantly, rattling off his self-introduction in more than 10 languages, and providing unmistakable evidence of his identity as Rabelais himself through stating that he is from Chinon in the
The self-inclusion by these authors within the humanity they satirize lends an unexpected graciousness to their literary masterpieces that is not always present in satirical works, nor in other genres. To set ourselves as critical writers alongside these authorial heroes is to approach humility, which, appropriately, is the opposite of what it might on the surface appear to do. Rabelais models the paradoxical unity of the high and the low when he, precedent to Sterne and myself, “makes a monstrosity of heroic genealogy by returning to those original mighty men or giants” (Seidel 61). The door is thus opened for local family histories to enter and join in the conversation through what is the essence of great literature and great literary criticism: good storytelling.
Sterne’s mastery of Rabelais’ storytelling idiom through “his ear for the Rabelaisian vocabulary” is evident in A Fragment in the Manner of Rabelais. He uses pervasive and persistent short phrases, such as “thrice-Reverend Brethren,” “Half in Half,” “ding dong” or “tickle it off” (New 1085). Rabelais models in his prologues with, “Most Noble and Illustrious Drinkers, and you thrice precious Pockified blades,” “Most Illustrious and thrice valorous Champions,” “most Illustrious Drinkers, and you thrice precious gouty Gentlemen” (Urquhart 1: 19, 2: 165, 3: 291). Another idiomatic device is “the Rabelaisian penchant for the comical anatomy,” such as “the Art of making all kinds of your theological, hebdomadical, rostrummical, humdrummical what d’ye call ‘ems” or “the most hydrostratical Reason” (New, Fragment 1085, 1091). We are reminded of Rabelais’ praise of genitals with such invented words as, “Genitories, [. . .] Ambages, Circuits and Flexuosities” (Urquhart 3: 317).
“Close scrutiny of physical reality” for satirical purposes, this attention to minutiae, recreates Rabelais’ satiric realism. Physical detail, such as “Thou hast fallen twelve feet & about five Inches below the Mark,” or “Five whole Pages, nine round Paragraphs, and a Dozen and a half of good Thoughts all of a Row,” is the laughable fluff Sterne stuffs his Rabelaisian idiom with (New, Fragment 1085, 1088-89). In large part, what makes Rabelais’ verbosely bawdy prose satirical are these little quips and turns he leads the reader through, such as the ending of the chapter wherein Pantagruel meets Panurge and rescues him from his hungry travels:
I am in very urgent necessity to feed, my teeth are sharp, my belly empty, my throat dry, and my stomack fierce and burning [. . .] which being done, he ate very well that evening, and (capon-like) went early to bed, then slept until dinner-time the next day, so that he made but three steps and one leap from the bed to the board. (Urquhart 2: 202)
Encyclopedic cataloging of knowledge is a standard in satire, touted in the Rabelaisian Fragment as “a thorough-stitch’d System of the Kerukopædia,” which transforms into the “Tristrapaedia” in Tristram Shandy (New 1083-92), itself reminiscent of Rabelais’ encyclopedic regurgitation in The First Book of Gargantua’s education from earliest childhood. And as the matter of first importance, “De la généalogie et antiquité de Gargantua chapitre 1” (On the genealogy and antiquity of Gargantua chapter 1) refers the reader to said genealogy in The Second Book on the giant’s son Pantagruel (l’Intégrale ed. 41). Chapter 1 claims simply that today’s giants (the highborn) may be descended from the lowborn and today’s lowborn are just as likely to be descended from the highborn. Rabelais claims that “je cuyde que soye descendu de quelque riche
Possibly the most outlandish use of encyclopedic cataloging is found in Rabelais’ lurid lists such as that expounded by Friar Ihon for the entertainment of Panurge, which continues mercilessly in triple columns for over two pages: “[. ..] Jupped Cod, Milked Cod, Calfeted Cod, Raised Cod, Odd Cod, Steeled Cod, Stale Cod, Orange-tawny Cod, Embroidered Cod, Glazed Cod, Interlarded Cod, Burger-like Cod, Impoudred Cod [. ..]” (Urquhart 3: 399). Urquhart rearranged Rabelais’ listing, supplementing it with a wealth of images of his own design. Yet readers of the English translation lose the sense of mock refinement conveyed through the original Middle French, as exemplary rhymes show:
couillon moignon, couillon de renom,
couillon paté, couillon naté, [. . .]
couillon poudrebif, couillon brandif,
couillon positif couillon gerondif, [. . .]
couillon d’algamala, couillon d’algebra,
couillon robuste, couillon venuste. (Œuvres Complètes 3: 432-33)
From the original French text, the notes report that this is a satire on Marot’s poetry in the blazon genre, regarding le blason du beau tetin (a heraldry on the beautiful tit or breast entitled “Tetin reffaict”). An exemplary line goes, “Tetin de satin blanc tout neuf ” (“Breast of brand new white satin”) (Œuvres Complètes 1416 Note 432.1). Rather than listing the glowing qualities of female breasts, Rabelais mocks Marot by listing grotesque descriptions of male testicles. English readers also note a loss of pleasing rhyme in translation from Premier Livre (The First Book), Prologe de l‘auteur (The Author’s Prologue): “L’odeur du vin, o combien plus est friant, riant, priant, plus céleste et délicieux que d’huille!” to: “The fragrant odour of the wine; O how much more dainty, pleasant, laughing, celestial and delicious it is, than the smell of oile!” (l’Intégrale ed. 1: 40; Urquhart 1: 22).
Fryar Ihon vehemently encourages Panurge to begin wedding preparations immediately, for hasn’t he heard that “the end of the World approacheth?” The good Fryar goes on to point out that “the Antichrist is already born,” although he is yet so little that he’s only scratched his Nurse (Urquhart 3: 401). This nursing, breast-scratching episode leads me to think that Sterne intends to infer that Tristram is the newborn Antichrist, following the satiric pattern of inverting Gargantua’s Christ-child role suggested by Gaignebet. Panurge, inspired by his friend’s marriage affirmation, and perhaps aroused at the thought of the Nurse’s breasts, responds: “Crescat; Nos qui vivimus, multiplicemur” (“He springs forth; We who live, let us multiply”) (Rabelais, Urquhart 3: 401). “He springs forth” is perhaps a double pun: on the Antichrist’s birth, and on Panurge’s penis becoming erect. This doubles the mockery of the Biblical injunction of Psalm CXXIII/CXXII to people the earth with godly progeny (often translated as, “Go forth and multiply”) (Œuvres Complètes 1150 Note 112.4, parenthetic comment mine).
Panurge praises Fryar Ihon’s poetic list, declaring that he had reserved Ihon’s advice on marriage—“a choice and delicate Morsel”—for last (Urquhart 3: 401). Sterne counters with:
The thing I lament is, that things have crowded in so thick upon me, that I have not been able to get into that part of my work, towards which, I have all the way, looked forwards, with so much earnest desire; and that is the campaigns, but especially the amours of my uncle Toby [. . .] No wonder I itch so much as I do, to get at these amours—They are the choicest morsel of my whole story! (
Literature students learn that, as future editors and translators, they will have freedom to judge how a text will be expressed through both word and physical form. Textual analysis of Tristram Shandy includes analysis of the physical text itself and the differences between editions. Another of Sterne’s unorthodox literary devices is constructed using the physical pages of the book. Ten pages comprising Chapter XXIV of Volume IV are left intentionally blank, creating the conundrum of the missing chapter (The Easton Press ed. 4: 204-13). Of note is that New’s Penguin edition contains no blank pages at that juncture, instead simply following Chapter XXIII on page 271 with Chapter XXV on page 282, skipping 10 pages in their numbering only. A clue symbolic of the satirically vapid nature of the entire book is found in Sterne’s depiction of two marbled end leaves, typical to18th century bookbinding, as “(motley emblem of my work!)” (
Sterne perhaps parodies Rabelais by inverting the book-bone’s external form vs. internal value ratio, yet with the same two strokes illustrated above, he affirms Rabelais’ earnest intent in likening his masterpiece to the marrow of a dog’s bone:
On an obvious level, Rabelais announces the problem of external form versus internal value, a matter of traditional concern in any defense of satire. [. . .] Thus the satiric act can be said to represent or portray varieties of ugliness by assuming their external shape, but clever readers of satire will be able to uncover the rare quality of imaginative wisdom within. (Seidel 71)
“Rabelaisian freedom with language and the church” (New, Fragment 1084) is exemplified in the melodramatic interchange between Trim and Dr. Slop over a sermon on the topic of religious affectation and zeal:
“This likewise is a sore evil under the sun; and I believe there is no one mistaken principle which, for its time, has wrought more serious mischiefs [. . .] see what scenes of cruelty, murders, rapines, blood-shed, [. . .] have all been sanctified by a religion not strictly governed by morality.” (
Rabelais relentlessly denudes and denigrates the Church through satirical use of its sacred language and ideology. In The First Book, we learn from Friar Ihon why some monks have bigger noses than others:
What is the cause (said Gargantua) that Friar Ihon hath such a faire nose? Because (said Grangousier) that God would have it so, who frameth us in such forme, and for such end, as is most agreeable with his divine Will, even as a Potter fashioneth his vessels. Because (said Ponocrates) he came with the first to the faire of noses, and therefore made choice of the fairest and the greatest. Pish, (said the Monk) that is not the reason of it, but, according to the true Monastical Philosophy, it is because my Nurse had soft teats, by virtue whereof, whilest she gave me suck, my nose did sink in as in so much butter. The hard breasts of Nurses make children short-nosed. But hey gay, Ad formam nasi cognoscitur ad te levavi. (Urquhart 1: 120)
Not only does this chapter inform us of Sterne’s source for his rendition of the intimate connection between breasts and noses, but it also tips the reader off to the understood correlation between the length of a man’s nose and that of his penis. “Ad formam nasi cognoscitur ad te levavi” translates to, “As the form of the nose, one learns, so I lifted up to you,” a double entendre. “Ad te levavi” is the beginning of Psalm 123/4, “I lift my eyes to thee,” which implies a man’s spiritual ascension towards Christ. Rabelais perverts that Biblical reference into a metaphor for the fashion in which a man’s penis becomes erect. Sterne also borrowed Rabelais’ reference to “Bruscambille’s prologue” on long noses, without having read it himself (
Like Rabelais, Sterne had good reason to calumniate religion in his era. Intolerance and savagery were rampant on both sides of the
Isaac (born 1648 near Chậteau-Chinon) was sent to school in
Isaac’s brothers Andrew and Simon fled France to the Bavarian Palatinate about 1655, traveling to Paltz on the Rhine near Manheim, and then on to America. The one brother remaining in
In 1685, Daniel Ferree (born 1650, a descendent of nobility from
Isaac and the Ferree’s at first stayed 4 years with his uncles Andrew and Simon, who had settled in
On September 10, 1712, William Penn’s Commissioners confirmed the grant to Daniel Ferree and Isaac LeFever (note the change to an English version of the name) of 2000 acres along Pequea Creek, 55 miles west of
Of interest regarding names, at the end of the chapter on Bruscambille’s prologue: Hafen Slawkenbergius is an invented name, from the German “Schlackenberg” (offal or excrement), and “Hafen” (chamberpot). Here Sterne draws from Rabelais’ satire against scholasticism wherein he uses a doctor “Hafen-muss” (pot of mush). (
The discipline of Literature, then, resorts to secret languages in order to delight, codes of meaning being more accessible to those who practice decoding great literature often. Royalist literature employed a secret language to circumnavigate Parliament through encoding and decoding of language, often replacing words with visual imagery and symbols. Ciphers became a permanent facet of people’s awareness, with Parliamentary condemnation of “royalists as devious and ‘cabbalistical’ (as they were called in the preface to The King’s Cabinet Opened in 1645)” (Potter 38). Simple ciphers often replaced letters with numbers, associating in Parliament’s eye, the art with Cabbalistic gematria. Experts at deciphering demonstrated that the art involved treating the cipher as a complete language, with different “languages” translating one fixed meaning. At that time, early education was dominated by arts subjects, so that in order to situate the sciences with their more “universal” language at the pinnacle of education, reformists pushed for a more practical, commercially-oriented education. Body language as we would call it today, was studied scientifically as a universal language candidate, designed to make clear sense of what the arts had been babbling on about for so long. Costuming and other artificial adornment was studied as communication (39, 42-43). Again we observe that nothing is new under the sun, particularly the fact that languages, whether scientific, literary or visual all perform Kaleidoscopic Communication.
Language as suspect and controversial played into the hands of authors such as Sterne, who had secret codes at their disposal for comic effect. Theology, philosophy and science alike were fair game for wordplay sport. During the Renaissance, Ficino’s neo-platonic use of theology as a merger between philosophy and religion facilitated Rabelais’ creation of recognizable literary archetypes, but who were not so specific as to be incriminating of his models in person. Both Lefèvre d’Étaples and Philip Melanchthon are suspect in the character of the theologue Hippothadee. Although Rabelais uses the actual name of a friend, “Boissonnet,” it is possible that he is implying the double-entendre of Lefèvre’s patron, Briçonnet. I can then speculate that Rabelais solves part of the mystery of Lefèvre’s whereabouts between 1480 and 1490 through his qualification that Hippothadee had never been married. In Hippothadee’s own words, he had “obtained from God the Gift and special Grace of Continency.” Shortly follows Panurge’s disclaimer that Hippothadee’s sensibilities are in delicate health, and he therefore should not attend the wedding festivities he’s just sanctioned (Urquhart 3: 415-16).
In Perfection Proclaimed, Smith supports my nihil novi observation regarding religion: “separatism was preceded by an even more spectral presence of radicals, going back to the 1550’s, including Anabaptists, ‘free will men’, and the Family of Love. [. . .] (C)ommentators developed hostile stereotypes of religious radicals in reaction to them” (4). Further, “the meaning of the body became a matter of inter-sectarian dispute” as Puritans searched Scripture for language portraying the divine as resident of the human body (15). Ironically parallel, the 18th century physico-theology of Anglican clergymen was natural religion, according to Sambrook, and “the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity appeared to be unscriptural [. . .]”. Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity pinpointed the single article of Christian faith to be belief in Jesus as Messiah (Sambrook 44). The sanctity of the Christ-child as embodying God in man follows an ancient mythic archetype that Rabelais, Sterne and Fielding parodied from the outset by beginning their novels with the birth, conception even, of a special child.
Claude Gaignebet’s 20-year research quest led him to equate the auspicious child Pantagruel with Saint Blaise, revered in Catholicism and mocked in Carnival. One of the images he brings us from his research adventures is Gargantua, figured in woodcut carrying “la sphère céleste,” symbolic of the globe (crucified with equatorial bands) carried by Saint Christopher (2: 18). Smith shows us the same crucified globe depicted in Hendrik Niclaes’ Revelatio Dei during the Interregnum, representing the Judgment, and at the same time Godhead as womb of rebirth (155). Alternatively, another of Niclaes’ woodcuts depicts man atop the globe, balanced between Scripture and the Seven Deadly Sins (165). The woodcut image of Gargantua carrying the globe bore with it the same implications as Niclaes’ Judgment: of man straddling both good and evil on earth. So from Rabelais’ to Sterne’s day there was no new thing under the sun; the symbolic image had transcended time, translating equally in Sterne’s day as in Rabelais’.
Likewise, The Fifth Book Chapter XLVI’s Pantagrueline sacred message in a bottle or vial, symbolizing in parody the male genitalia would have been as easily recognized in Sterne’s time due to such propagations of the bottle image as man’s heart full of Scriptural wisdom, replete with circumcision (Gaignebet 2: 19, 24-25; Smith 166-7). Tristram as narrator attests that the sperm released from the male genitalia—the “Homunculus”—embodies an entire human, having “all the claims and rights of humanity” (
The Enlightenment, Roy Porter suggests in his succinct book entitled that, was the precise point in European history when the “secular intelligentsia,” the intellectual anarchists of free societies emerged (10). Roughly a man’s lifespan, from the 1720’s to the 1780’s, was all the time needed to grow the seeds of literacy, affluence and publishing into a plant that might be termed freedom of thought (4, 10). Yet Rabelais’ 16th century Pantagrueline pentafole—suggested to be hemp/marijuana by Claude Gaignebet within his 1000-page work, A Plus Hault Sense: L’Ésotérisme Spirituel et Charnel de Rabelais—perhaps represents to our generation the same right to freedom of thought that it did in Rabelais’ time (2: 56). Perhaps we never did drop a stitch in the fabric of time (nihil novi sub sole), but need only claim Shandean freedom once again, as Sterne did in his time, through literary metaphor whether in creative writing or in the critical essay. In his time, at the first christening of the word-sign that sprang forth from his own fons caballinus, Sterne would have been aware that to call on the name of Solomon is to conjure his form:
“Nay (neigh?), if you come to that, Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,—have they not had their Hobby-Horses;—their running horses,—their coins and their cockle-shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles and their pallets,——their maggots and their butterflies?—and so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King’s high-way, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,——pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?” (New, Penguin ed. 1:13 parenthetic comment mine)
The form of King Solomon the mythic giant, whom Sterne summons through these words of his narrator, is that of King Walter’s son himself, Tristram: the son, everyman, is born. Gaignebet explains that those who are born—Gargantua, Pantagruel (Tristram)—fall between Solomon’s two columns into primal matter as l’homme sauvage (savage man), akin to wood becoming bone, and are depicted on one hand as savage saint, or roi Ursus (Bear king), but in Carnival imagery as fou sauvage (savage fool) (2: 107-130, 185-218). This mythic imagery of village religion translates human ideas in mythopoetic form.
On this the Ides of March 2005, Solomon’s second pillar fell to Earth, quaking as a giant rift in her crust deep under the oceans of
My subjective experience relative to a current event exemplifies the kind of “other-worldly framework for understanding man, society and nature” that was left behind “on one side of the great cultural divide” in favor of secularization. We, “the Enlightenment’s children,” are still struggling to free ourselves of the captivity the political powers made of it. Rather than allowing human beings, “pregnant with possibilities,” to bear fruit of their own free will, government corralled them “to ensure obedience and discipline amongst children at school and adults in the workplace” (Porter 65-68).
The social issue of educating today’s children is informed by Porter’s historical critique of the Enlightenment, by Rabelais’ Renaissance rendition of its importance, and by Sterne’s 18th century retelling of it. The importance of Gargantua’s education is parodied in that of Tristram. Today’s Academy of higher education inherits children trained in the “captivities” of government-regimented primary and secondary schools. Porter includes human values among the techniques we can utilize “to solve the problems of the modern, urban industrial society” (68-69). This analogy of the unschooled, the uncivilized, as savage wild child demonstrates the universality of Rabelais’ archetypical myth. Gaignebet clarifies that his model of conception is associated with antiquity’s god of time Chronos, depicted descending between the two pillars made up of Renaissance courtiers and Carnival participants, to eject in a blast from between his legs both marrow and sperm: Aїon, “le temps toujours enfant,” time that is forever child, inseminating earth (2: 32).
Gaignebet points out, using Renaissance imagery and photographs of modern-day village religion Carnival-goers blowing bellows at each other’s asses, that Saint Blaise-Pantagruel’s life-renewing breath is subverted as an explosive blast from between his legs: a vulgar fart, memorialized for all time in the artwork of building cornices. Gaignebet describes how Rabelais reifies time through rituals surrounding feasting and drinking, and as a devotee of Carnival celebrates the return of “Roger Bontemps,” “Roger Goodtimes,” and the arrival of the golden age (2: 32). This idea is integral to Rabelais’ purpose:
A moy n’est que honneur et gloire d’estre dict et réputé bon gaultier et bon compaignon, et en ce nom suis bien venu en toutes bonnes compaignies de Pantagruelistes. (I truly hold it for an honour and praise to be called and reputed a frolick Gaulter, and a Robin goodfellow; for under this name am I welcome in all choise companies of Pantagruelists [. . .].) (l’Intégral 40; Urquhart 22)
From the Latin gaudere (to be glad), “bon gaultier” becomes “a frolick Gaulter, which translates to a Merry Walter, a pleasant companion. So Sterne confers the name of Walter, following Rabelais in the Platonic tradition of equating Name and Form: in Latin, the warning Nomen Omen means that your name is an omen of your character. Tristram speaks incredulously of his father Walter’s formulaic belief:
I would sooner undertake to explain for the hardest problem in Geometry, than to pretend to account for it [. . .] (namely) in respect to the choice and imposition of Christian names, on which he thought a great deal more depended than what superficial minds were capable of conceiving. [. . .] His opinion, in this matter, was, That there was a strange kind of magick bias, which good or bad names, as he called them, irresistibly impress’d upon our characters and conduct” (Florida ed. 1:57-58).
Recapping his work’s central image for the reader in leaving the palace at the close of the final Fifth Book, Rabelais conjures into daylight the carnal archetypical Idea of marriage through the (cuckold-making) Form named Mars and Venus. He positions the Idea of Divine Marriage hidden in night as more dear, through the archetypical Form of Jupiter and Alcmène, mother of Hercules—our authors’ mythic giants. Rabelais hears the voice of a great “fallot,” which translates as both a droll person and a lantern, with legs like tree trunks—our primal matter, our savage saint—speaking. There is no good cheer greater than this night, when Lanterns—our chosen Masters in the learned tradition—are in place, accompanied by their amiable droll companions with their legs of wood—we of literary inheritance:
Notez, beuveurs, que tout alloit de hait; et se faisoient bien valoir les gentils fallotz avecques leurs jambes de boys. [. . .] Au départir du palais, je ouys la voix d’un grand fallot a jambe torte, disant qu’un bon soir vault mieulx que aultant de bons mastins qu’il y a eu de chastaignes en farce d’oye depuis le déluge de Ogiges, voulant donner entendre qu’il n’est bonne chère que de nuyt, lorsque Lanternes sont en place, accompagnées de leurs gentilz fallotz. Telles chères le soleil ne peult veoir de bon œil, tesmoing Jupiter: lorsqu’il coucha avecques Alcmène mere d’Hercules, il la feit cacher deux jours, car peu devant il avoit descouvert le larcin de Mars et de Vénus. (l’Intégrale ed. 931-32)
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[1] Facts from the unpublished genealogical work of Lillian Bernice (Bee) LaFevers are woven between facts commonly known to scholars of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and will therefore not be cited individually.
[2] Historical dates and facts on Lefèvre d’Étaples not otherwise cited are from Scott R. Clark’s Chronology of the Medieval and Reformation Church, referenced in Works Cited.
[3] Historical dates and facts on Rabelais not otherwise cited are from the Chronology of the Everyman’s Library edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, translated by Urquhart and Motteux, referenced in Works Cited.
[4] Historical dates and facts on Sterne not otherwise cited are from the Chronology of New Penguin edition of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, referenced in Works Cited.
[5] Translation forthcoming by Kathryn LaFevers Evans.
